Mod - the title was supposed to be "Canadian legislation to compel Facebook, Google to pay for news"
[
reuters.com...]
"The news sector in Canada is in crisis," Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said at a news conference, introducing the bill put forward by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government.
The "Online News Act," or House of Commons bill C-18, will require digital platforms that have a bargaining imbalance, measured by metrics like a firm's global revenue, with news businesses to make fair deals, that would then be assessed by a regulator.
A bit more about that crisis
In Canada media is already subsidized by government, both directly through taxpayer funded payments to major gov approved sources and indirectly via grant applications for smaller approved sources. They key is the "approved" part.
The problem seems to be public trust as readership continues to decline on most funded sites. More money won't fix that but it may make it worse.Funding journalism is great, only funding biased journalism is self-defeating, in my opinion. Another bill. bill c-11 dubbed the internet censorship bill, risks making the crisis worse by escalating the bias further.
