Wilf Dinnick: C-18 is already too late to save Canada's legacy media
Our government is unable to keep up with the pace of digital disruption.
By: Wilf Dinnick
The escalating rhetoric between Heritage Minister Rodriguez and the big tech giants over Bill C-18 is an enormous distraction from a much more serious and frightening crisis, the relevance and reliability of Canadian news in our digital ecosystem.
For those not up to speed, Bill C-18, also known as the Online News Act, is a pay-for-links scheme, demanding tech giants compensate news outlets for the use of publishers' news stories. After more than a year of debate, in which just about every news publisher appeared before government to argue about the bill, those big tech companies have runaround the whole process: Meta, nee Facebook, has threatened to stop publishing news articles, while Google has experimented with blocking Canadian news altogether.
This would have been amazing in 2006, when Facebook launched its news feed and started using publishers' content. In 2023, it’s a different story. Publishers are angry. Can you blame them?
The big tech companies executed one of the most effective bait-and-switches in business history, promising news outlets massive audiences through social media. Once hooked, news outlets had to pay to sustain and grow those audiences. Publishers have been hostage ever since.
Bill C-18 was an attempt to give publishers leverage versus the big tech companies. But as we’re beginning to see, by the time the bill is passed, it will already be obsolete. Even if the legislation manages to wheedle a few dollars out of Meta and Google, a pay-for-links scheme is still rooted in the failing business models that underpin the deteriorating news industry as a whole. This decline will eventually be accelerated by AI, likely changing the way we consume content, and who produces that content.
The math that is emerging is not pretty: the news outlets that are proving financially sustainable are not those that can jerry-rig social media algorithms and flashy headlines to earn clicks, but rather those that can generate a paying subscriber base. And there simply aren’t enough Canadians who are willing to pay for news.
That’s not changing. So what now?
At its essence, the debate revolves around the market value of publishers' content in shared links and the revenue it generates through digital display ads. Both news organizations and big tech companies rely on display ads, but that revenue is like a spigot, easily turned off and on, at the whims of the ad market. Digital advertising simply isn’t as lucrative as its print counterpart; as newspapers lose advertisers in papers, they aren’t making up lost ground on the web. Even larger digital audiences cannot compensate for this through volume; the price disparity between the former value of a print ad and the much lower value of a modern digital ad is too great. To make matters worse, digital ad markets are increasingly dominated by Google and Meta — news outlets’ major competitors for cash.
None of these trends are changing. It’s futile and counterproductive to imagine that any government legislation will return traditional media to its former glory. Amid this reality, the debate over C-18 leaves us rudderless at a frightening time in the news business.
More confounding still, C-18s provisions are increasingly irrelevant because those same tech giants that disrupted the news business are doing it again. Even as they are exiting the news business, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are changing the way we are consuming media content.
We are moving away from the Social Graph — where friends and family send us news links on Facebook, or through messaging apps (what Bill C-18 aims to solve) to the Interest Graph. These TikTok-like algorithms select content for us, based on our online networks, and connect us with people with shared interests along with the products, places and ideas these instruments suggest will be relevant.
Now, to that largely invisible shift in underlying function, add in language-based AI, large language models (LLMs), the technology driving applications such as ChatGPT. Still in their infancy, these LLM-driven technologies are already getting around paywalls and accessing news content for their queries. Yet again, publishers are dependent on the big tech companies' cooperation, and also are largely at their mercy in this new game of cat and mouse for attention and revenue.
So where does that news come from and who gets paid?
Clearly, our government is unable to keep up with the pace of digital disruption. We need a smarter, more nimble, and comprehensive response. For starters, it might include substantial tax credits for major publishers to incentivize innovation in news distribution by and for Canadians. Establishing transparent industry standards for trusted news sources, which should be widely publicized, also seems wise.
We do need to celebrate and support the next Canadaland, or The Logic, The Narwhal or The Line, but no single outlet or operation is the answer. Going forward, we must not spend any more time or money chasing solutions to old problems.
Even if Bill C-18 is successful, the paywalls will likely persist for the best news sources, and journalism will primarily serve the one per cent who can afford it while excluding and marginalizing everyone else.
The flow of information is only getting faster, with more mis- and disinformation driven by a proliferation of untrustworthy sources of information. These purveyors are adept at deploying the newest technology and maximizing their own missions by playing to these instruments’ strength — lightening fast distribution without accountability. This is an undeniable fact and cannot be reversed.
We need a concrete plan that recognizes and stresses the value and significance of trusted news as an essential part of a well-functioning democracy.
And for that, Bill C-18 is already history.
Wilf Dinnick recently returned to Canada after 20-plus years of living overseas as an award-winning foreign correspondent, reporting for ABC News and CNN. He also served as the head of Al Jazeera's online news, and in 2010, launched Canada's first online local news start-up. Wilf now lives in Toronto and runs Mission A, a strategic communications firm.
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