Democracy withers in the shadows

Following the release of the recent News Media Canada report calling on the Canadian government to adopt an Australian-style system to prevent anticompetitive practices on the part of Big Tech companies and fairly compensate publishers in order to address the crisis in Canadian journalism, Michael Geist, the Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, took this newspaper's parent company to task.

Writing on his blog, Geist noted that Postmedia papers posted articles about the report to Facebook 21 times, and then quipped that if the publishing industry had its way, Facebook would be “required to pay them for including links to their articles that they themselves have posted.”

As is clear to most observers, the publishing industry's strategy isn't to make Facebook pay every time a link is posted to social media, and then go ahead and post as many links as possible.

This is about newspapers being forced to operate under a system in which a duopoly, Facebook and Google,

largely control both the platforms that Canadians go to in order to find news, and the advertising system that funds quality journalism.

Canadians can be forgiven for not knowing the full extent of the situation, because most of it happens behind the scenes. Try, for example, doing a Google search for the “U.S. election” using the most popular web browser (Google Chrome) on the most prolific mobile operating system (Google's Android).

A carousel of news stories will appear at the top of the page with links to a variety of news sources. Clicking on one of them will take you to what appears to be that publisher's website, but if you look at the URL bar, you'll notice that you're still on google.com.

These pages are rendered using AMP, a technology that was originally developed by Google to allow news pages to load faster on mobile devices, and hosted on Google's servers. All well and good, except that Google effectively forces media outlets to use AMP, and comply with its other policies, if they want to be featured in the search results.

According to a recent report from the U.S. Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, “In order to comply with the AMP format, publishers must allow Google to host the content on Google's web servers and must agree to allow Google to present their content in virtually any context Google chooses. Further, publishers must sign over broad rights to Google that allow Google to use news outlets' content in any Google products.”

Google has been accused of using AMP to gain more control over the advertisements that are being displayed with content that the web giant had no hand in producing, in order to cement its oligopolistic position in the online advertising market, gain valuable data on consumers of news and siphon more revenue for itself. And Facebook is no better: AMP was created to compete with the social media giant's Facebook Instant Articles protocol, which renders news content inside Facebook's mobile app, bypassing newspaper websites entirely.

Opting out is generally not an option, either, as Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook, now drive a majority of traffic to newspaper websites.

When, for example, the Wall Street Journal refused to comply with Google's “first click free” policy, which allows readers to bypass newspaper paywalls when they come from Google, the venerable American newspaper noted that traffic coming from Google dropped by 44 per cent. If that is not an example of a monopoly using its market dominance to punish companies that don't play by its rules, we don't know what is.

That Facebook and Google control the platforms that most readers use to find news content is only one side of the coin: they also have an oligopoly over the online advertising business. According to News Media Canada, the two companies control over 75 per cent of Canada's digital advertising market. They control both the demand side platforms, which advertisers use to buy ad space, and the supply side platforms, which content creators use to sell space.

By doing this, they are able to claim around half of every dollar spent on online advertising — money that should be going to support the men and women who work hard every day to bring you the information you need.

Prof. Geist dismissed the News Media Canada report, and the ensuing coverage of it, as a “self-interested media campaign.” But what this is really about is reforming a market that has become dominated by an oligopoly of foreign companies that have little respect for the privacy rights of Canadians and are using their positions to extract rents from content that they invest no money in producing, thereby harming not only Canadians' ability to get accurate, trusted information, but also our ability to keep government accountable.

In the shadows, democracy withers; only in the light can we have the vibrant debate and well-informed citizenry that are needed to sustain a constitutional democracy. Canada's newspapers shine that light, but they can't do it if monopolies like Google and Facebook are standing in the way.

CANADA'S NEWSPAPERS SHINE THAT LIGHT, BUT THEY CAN'T DO IT IF ... GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ARE STANDING

IN THE WAY.