“Meta’s practices are clearly designed to discipline Canadian news companies, prevent them from participating in and accessing the advertising market, and significantly reduce their visibility to Canadians on social media channels,” the CBC said in a joint statement with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, a trade organization that represents newspapers.
Isn’t the argument for C-18 that the advertising market isn’t doing the news organizations much good anyway?
And as far as their visibility on social media channels, the news organization created this problem for themselves in the first place by encouraging people to share their work on social media; if they’d focused on making sure people know where to find them instead of posting all their work maybe their sites would be getting more traffic. They tried a business strategy, it didn’t work out, and now instead of coming up with a better strategy they’re trying to force Meta and Google to give them money and make the bad strategy work.
Canadians expect tech giants to follow the law in our country.
The law says Meta and Google have to pay to carry news; it doesn’t say they have to carry news. Maybe the law should have been written without that gaping hole?
I think it’s worth noting that news organizations are struggling not because less people are reading news but rather because advertising is so cheap now. When newspapers were the only advertising source they could charge high prices. Then TV came out which hurt them, but this was balanced by TV spending some money on journalism. Now with the internet the prices newspapers can charge for advertising is sooo much less than they could previously.
Anyway, I think it’s worth noting this because there’s this narrative that news organizations helped build up social media (and maybe deserve a cut). I mean really, how many people decided to make an Instagram account or Facebook account because CBC happened to have a page they could follow? Of the people I know who use Facebook or Instagram, none use it for news. This also means that utilizing social media to drive traffic may still be a good strategy - if the government hadn’t effectively blocked that.
Isn’t the argument for C-18 that the advertising market isn’t doing the news organizations much good anyway?
And as far as their visibility on social media channels, the news organization created this problem for themselves in the first place by encouraging people to share their work on social media; if they’d focused on making sure people know where to find them instead of posting all their work maybe their sites would be getting more traffic. They tried a business strategy, it didn’t work out, and now instead of coming up with a better strategy they’re trying to force Meta and Google to give them money and make the bad strategy work.
The law says Meta and Google have to pay to carry news; it doesn’t say they have to carry news. Maybe the law should have been written without that gaping hole?
Canadian news companies: Lobbies government to mandate royalties for news being shared on social media platforms.
Social media platforms: Stops sharing the news created by Canadian news companies.
Canadian news companies:
The officially stated reason for Bill C-18 is to give news organizations in Canada balanced negotiating power with entities like Facebook.
Which, I guess, was successful. Facebook pushed away from the bargaining table as it no longer feels like it holds dominance over it.
But now the news companies are saying that’s not good enough. They want more power than Facebook has.
I think it’s worth noting that news organizations are struggling not because less people are reading news but rather because advertising is so cheap now. When newspapers were the only advertising source they could charge high prices. Then TV came out which hurt them, but this was balanced by TV spending some money on journalism. Now with the internet the prices newspapers can charge for advertising is sooo much less than they could previously.
Anyway, I think it’s worth noting this because there’s this narrative that news organizations helped build up social media (and maybe deserve a cut). I mean really, how many people decided to make an Instagram account or Facebook account because CBC happened to have a page they could follow? Of the people I know who use Facebook or Instagram, none use it for news. This also means that utilizing social media to drive traffic may still be a good strategy - if the government hadn’t effectively blocked that.