After months of negotiations, Canada and Google reached a “historic” agreement this week for the Californian giant to pay compensation to the media of communication of the country in exchange for the distribution of its contents.
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge announced that Google will provide financial aid of 100 million Canadian dollars per year (74 million dollars), although the figure will be adjusted each year with inflation.
The Canadian Executive will also reserve the right to review the terms of the pact if Google reaches a more advantageous agreement for the media in other countries.
“We are very pleased to have been able to reach an agreement with Google to ensure that journalists, including small local media, are supported for years to come,” celebrated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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The agreement is a consequence of the approval in Canada of the Online News Act, which requires Google and Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) to compensate media outlets for sharing their content on the platforms.
The move is an attempt by Ottawa to boost an industry that has suffered massive losses in advertising revenue. With it, the federal government seeks to stop the deterioration of the press in a country in which 500 media outlets have closed in the last 15 years.
The law, known as C-18, will go into effect on December 19, but Meta and Google had spoken out against it after its approval in August.
Platform managers argued that they do not obtain many economic benefits from the news, and that they are actually providing a service to media outlets, large and small, helping them reach readers, potential subscribers and advertisers.
In response to the law, Meta blocked all links to Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram to prevent payments. A move that has hit business media outlets that relied on Facebook to reach their communities, including small organizations that are sometimes the only providers of local news in rural Canada.
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This is the case of the cities of Woodstock and Saint Andrews, in the eastern province of New Brunswick, an area ignored by national publications and neglected by regional newsrooms, and from which Facebook’s measure took away their main online distribution channel.
Google, for its part, had threatened to remove news from search results before the law took effect. Removing news from the world’s most popular search engine, in fact, would have harmed the media even more than Meta’s move, since Google is the main traffic engine for many publications.
To try to resolve the impasse, the Trudeau government proposed specific contributions in equivalent dollars at least 4 percent of its annual revenue in Canada, which amounts to about 172 million Canadian dollars a year for Google and 62 million Canadian dollars for Facebook. The agreement finally reached with Google represents a smaller sum and Meta still refuses to pay the Canadian media.
The agreement reached establishes that Google will determine how it will negotiate with the media the distribution of the 100 million Canadian dollars. Google is also committed to continuing to offer programs to Canadian information companies for the training of their employees and the use of digital tools.
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It will not provide Canadian journalism with the level of support we hoped to see
Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said the agreement is a good thing and added that he would have been “worried about the future of the industry” if Google had decided to block multimedia content from its search engine.
The citizen media defense movement Les Amis He fears, however, that the sum promised by the American giant will not be enough to rescue an item in crisis.
“While this agreement will provide a much-needed injection of funds to the Canadian media sector, it will not provide Canadian journalism with the level of support we hoped to see,” its CEO, Marla Boltman, told AFP.
*With AFP, Efe and Bloomberg
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