The fight over C-18 isn't about journalism — it's about power
Aaron Wherry | CBC News | Posted: July 8, 2023 8:00 AM | Last Updated: July 8, 2023
The Liberals seem to be keen for a fight with tech giants — but that doesn't make it an equal contest
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez says he won't be pushed around by Google and Facebook in the ongoing fight over C-18, the Online News Act.
"They're superpowers. They're huge. They're rich, powerful. Lots of big lawyers. They can be intimidating," Rodriguez told reporters this week at a news conference convened to announce that the federal government would be suspending its advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
"But are we going to let ourselves be intimidated? We can't."
In fact, Rodriguez has framed this refusal to be intimidated in rather existential terms.
"We cannot have tech giants as powerful as they are, with big lawyers and everything, coming here and telling members of Parliament and the government elected by the people, 'This is what you're going to do,'" he told CTV last week. "We can't accept that. We're a sovereign nation."
WATCH: Federal government suspends advertising on Facebook, Instagram
Thing is, if you have to insist you won't be intimidated, it's probably because there's a reason to believe you could be intimidated. And that's the basic problem facing both the Liberal government and the Canadian media industry — they find themselves in a spot where the major Internet platforms are able to exert significant pressure on them.
On a fundamental level, the fight over C-18 isn't really about journalism. It's about power.
- This week on Cross Country Checkup, our Ask Me Anything focuses on Google and Meta's plan to eventually remove links to Canadian journalism in response to the federal government's Online News Act. Fill out the details on this form to get your questions in early.
Our changing relationship with Big Tech
The Trudeau government may very well relish the idea of a fight with powerful global entities. At a news conference on Thursday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland referred to the government's antagonists as "American tech giants" — and neither the first nor the third words seemed accidental.
It wasn't so long ago that the major social media platforms were celebrated — or at least respected — for the communication and innovation they facilitated. Their creators were treated like oracles. Few, if any, major political or media figures failed to embrace the social-media era. Google's parent company nearly built its own neighbourhood in Toronto.
But the days when Trudeau would appear beside Sheryl Sandberg — the former Facebook executive — for photo ops and chats about gender equality now seem like ancient history.
The United States presidential election in 2016 imposed a reality check on the actual potential of these platforms. What followed was a push to deal with a series of related problems: misinformation, disinformation, "online harms," foreign interference and the financial difficulties of the traditional news industry.
(The last nine months at Twitter have also served as a reminder of how much any given social media platform ultimately operates at the whim of the billionaire who owns it.)
Whether the Online News Act takes the exactly right approach to addressing the last of those problems or not, it exists downstream from the real issue — the dominance over digital advertising that Google and Facebook have been allowed to achieve. The best that might be said for the legislation is that it could represent a "stopgap" solution for the industry, buying it some time to adapt.
(CBC/Radio-Canada's corporate position is that the Online News Act will help level the playing field and contribute to a healthy news ecosystem in Canada.)
The American media industry is belatedly realizing that chasing the viral Internet traffic social-media platforms can generate was ultimately a fool's errand. But as the fight over C-18 makes clear, that traffic also gave a platform like Facebook an incredible amount of power — power it is now wielding by blocking Canadian news.
The lesson might simply be that, no matter how much fun the apps are, allowing individual corporate entities to accumulate so much unchecked power always comes with downsides.
The power of Facebook
That Facebook has an outsized influence within the world's democracies is hardly a new observation. The American writer Charlie Warzel made the point in the pages of the New York Times in 2020, citing the prescience of another American writer, Max Read, who made that point three years earlier. The Canadian example is only another reminder.
That power was on display even as the federal government was announcing its advertising suspension.
After Rodriguez announced the move, a reporter asked if the Liberal Party would suspend its own advertising on Facebook. Rodriguez deferred — he was speaking as heritage minister for the government, he said, not as a representative of the party. But it soon became clear the party would not be pulling its ads.
Never one to turn down an opportunity to make hay, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took to Twitter on Thursday night to challenge the Liberal Party to put its money where its mouth is and avoid the platform entirely. Poilievre's party opposes C-18 and isn't pulling its own ads. And both he and the Liberal Party surely understand that a suspension of Liberal ads would amount to unilateral disarmament.
The unique and expansive access to Canadians that Facebook provides — the political value of advertising on the platform — likely means that the Liberal Party can't afford to abandon it. At least not unless every other party is willing to do likewise.
Facebook and Google may be taking a tough stance with the Canadian government because they fear the power of precedent — if Canada succeeds, other (bigger, more cost-intensive) countries might follow suit. But the vocal public support the Trudeau government is getting from American and British politicians might suggest other legislators realize what a challenge they're up against.
The Online News Act may or may not play a useful role in fostering a healthier media ecosystem in Canada. But the legislation is ultimately the result of how deeply embedded private companies like Google and Facebook have become in democratic life.