Our view: Digital publishers need a level playing field

It is no secret to anyone who has been paying even cursory attention that companies that publish local news in Canada are fighting for their lives.

There are many reasons, but to recap a few: Changing readership habits, splintering advertising markets, the dramatic shift to digital reading, technology ... The list goes on and doesn’t need to be repeated in detail here.

Let us say up front that media publishers have not always done everything right. We were painfully late to recognize the size and speed of digital transition.

But one of the most serious factors is the emergence of foreign-owned digital giants like Facebook and Google as a world-dominating near monopoly on digital information transmission.

Part of the reason they have become as dominant as they have is that they have used the content of Canadian publishers as fuel. They scrape content we publish, feed it into their massive platforms, and republish it to give heft to their digital products. As a result Google and Facebook receive 80 per cent of all digital advertising revenue. They could not rake in that revenue without our content.

They do not pay us to use this content. We pay professional journalists a living wage to gather and report news. Facebook and Google take it without permission and use it, paying nothing for doing so. Think about this for a moment.

Suppose you have a business that produces something that has value. You sell it and that’s how your business survives, and hopefully prospers. But what if someone comes along and takes the product of your work, and gives it away to the same people who might otherwise pay for it? They are able to do that because they have a different business model, and they are exponentially bigger than your business. You haven’t got a chance. That’s not only unfair, it is bad for the economy.

That is what Canadian news publishers have been dealing with. This week News Media Canada, a lobby group made up of digital news publishers, released report called “Levelling the Digital Playing Field.” Just about every major Canadian digital publisher is involved, including Torstar, the company that publishes this newspaper and its online content.

The publishers are not looking for handouts. There is no public money and no impact on taxpayers. They’re seeking fairness. We pay millions of dollars each year to employ people who generate local journalism, and we pay to publish that content. By any measure, it is wrong for someone else to take that content and use it for their own purposes without compensating the source.

What News Media Canada wants is for the federal government to empower publishers to collectively negotiate with the digital giants, collaborating to find a fair share. If that negotiation fails, the industry wants binding arbitration to decide on a fair revenue sharing formula. Currently that sort of collaborative action is illegal under the Competitions Act.

This isn’t a new idea. A very similar regulatory regime is now in place in Australia, where the country and media market are similar to Canada. (Which illustrates that this is not a Canadian problem, it’s a problem across the world.)

In that country, the digital giants don’t like this idea. In fact, Facebook has threatened to stop posting and sharing news rather than compensate the publishers of that news. That’s the sort of mindset we are dealing with.

In last month’s throne speech, the Canadian government promised to act. It doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, it just needs to follow this blueprint to create a level and fair playing field. It should do so quickly.