Student publications and nonprofit community outlets are caught up in a drawn-out battle between the Canadian government, big-name publishers, and Meta.
This whole thing was 100% predictable. Meta doesn’t need news to populate users’ feeds. Why the fuck would Meta pay $60MM/y for content they don’t need and that doesn’t materially benefit them?
This whole plan was ass-backwards to begin with. C-18 is terrible legislation.
If they wanted to fund news publishing with tech company profits, then they need to introduce decoupled taxes and grants. Add a (digital) advertising tax, then put in local news grants where any journalist who can prove they’ve created a minimum amount of local/Canadian news content that meets whatever standards they set gets a grant. Restrict it to small non-profits and registered new agencies (or whatever).
I must be missing something, because this all seemed obvious to me since this was introduced, and I’ve seen lots of other people saying the same things. Maybe there’s some legal reason why a straight advertising tax wouldn’t work? Surely, there must be some reason they went down this path over the more obvious and simpler one?
This whole thing was 100% predictable. Meta doesn’t need news to populate users’ feeds. Why the fuck would Meta pay $60MM/y for content they don’t need and that doesn’t materially benefit them?
This whole plan was ass-backwards to begin with. C-18 is terrible legislation.
If they wanted to fund news publishing with tech company profits, then they need to introduce decoupled taxes and grants. Add a (digital) advertising tax, then put in local news grants where any journalist who can prove they’ve created a minimum amount of local/Canadian news content that meets whatever standards they set gets a grant. Restrict it to small non-profits and registered new agencies (or whatever).
I must be missing something, because this all seemed obvious to me since this was introduced, and I’ve seen lots of other people saying the same things. Maybe there’s some legal reason why a straight advertising tax wouldn’t work? Surely, there must be some reason they went down this path over the more obvious and simpler one?