By Ismail Shakil
OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday that Meta Platforms’ opposition to a bill making Facebook and other internet companies pay for journalistic content is based on a flawed argument of that news has no economic value.
Speaking before a parliamentary committee on the Trudeau government’s legislation on Monday, a Meta employee said the news had a social value but not an economic value for the company.
“If we’re being asked to compensate these editors for material that has no economic value to us, that’s where the problem lies,” Meta Canada’s head of public policy Rachel Curran told the committee.
Trudeau said on Tuesday that “this argument that the internet giants are making is not only flawed, it’s dangerous to our democracy, to our economy.”
Facebook’s stance against paying for news “shows how deeply irresponsible and alienated they are,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa.
Bill C-18, or the “Online News Act,” proposes rules to force platforms like Facebook and Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news outlets for their content, a move similar to a law passed in Australia in 2021.
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