Follow through on agenda to tame Big Tech
For the Department of Canadian Heritage it’s hello to the new minister, same as the old minister.
Pablo Rodriguez headed the ministry for more than a year in 2018-19 after Mélanie Joly was unceremoniously demoted for botching key files. (Now, astonishingly, she’s riding high as minister of foreign affairs, demonstrating that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a big believer in second chances, at least for some people).
Rodriguez, too, gets a second crack, returning to Heritage in the wake of the ambitious but ultimately frustrating tenure of Steven Guilbeault. And with that previous experience behind him, the new/old minister has no excuses to rag the puck on the Liberal government’s agenda for digital reform.
During the federal election campaign, the Liberals could not have been clearer: Re-elect us and we will put dealing with the challenges of Big Tech at the top of our to-do list.
The party made a lot of promises — well over100 of them. But only 10 came with a pledge to act within the first 100 days of a new mandate, and three of those ten high-priority items involve regulating different aspects of the Internet.
Enough voters bought into that package to put the Liberals back in government for a third time, and the government should step up and do what it said it would do on its way to re-election. It should be held to its promises in all three areas:
á Updating the Broadcasting Act to take account of 21st-century digital realities: The point is to make sure foreign-owned streaming services, such as Netflix and Spotify, direct some of the money they make in Canada toward creating more Canadian content.
Traditional broadcasters have been required to do that for decades, and it’s high time that the digital giants who are making bags of money in Canada contribute their share. The government also wants those companies to adjust their algorithms to make Canadian content more visible (what’s known as “discoverability”).
All that was in Bill C-10, which Guilbeault introduced in the last Parliament and which ran into a storm of controversy over fears it would imperil free expression. The government contributed to the mess by removing a section of the bill they feared would exempt YouTube, leading to cries that it was trying to police everyone’s Tweets and social media content.
Rodriguez’s job is to bring in a bill that accomplishes the goal of supporting Canadian content, but steers clear of anything that would amount to a threat to free speech.
á Pushing back against “online harms”: Days before the election call, the government produced legislation to deal with five kinds of harmful content, including hate speech, sexual exploitation of children, and terrorism.
The legislation calls for setting up a new regulator, the Digital Safety Commissioner of Canada, to interpret and enforce the law, modelled after similar bodies in Australia, France and other countries. And it would impose a 24-hour rule for social media companies to take down harmful content.
This bill didn’t get much public debate, since it was overshadowed by speculation about an election and then the campaign itself. There’s certainly room for debating details, but the general intent is right. There’s been an explosion of hate speech and other noxious content in digital spaces and there should be a way of pushing back against the most extreme examples.
á Levelling the playing field between news producers and the digital giants: The biggest companies, Google and Facebook, earn revenues by publishing news content produced by other media — including traditional news publishers like the Star.
Those same companies have, between the two of them, been scooping up about 80 per cent of digital advertising in Canada and the result is that news publishers have been starved for ad revenue. Dozens of newspapers have closed and it’s been a struggle for others to maintain the kind of robust coverage that’s vital for democracy.
The Liberals were explicit in their platform about what they intend to do about this: They promised to introduce legislation within 100 days to “require digital platforms that generate revenues from the publication of news content to share a portion of their revenues with Canadian news outlets.” They went on to say the new legislation should be based on the so-called Australian model, requiring the digital giants to work out deals with publishers.
In the meantime, some news producers have made arrangements with Google (including, this past week, Torstar) and with Facebook. But those deals are time-limited and came about at least in part because of the threat of legislation. A new framework is also needed for smaller publishers without a lot of clout to negotiate their own deals with the digital giants.
The government should carry through with its promise and introduce legislation to provide a general framework for compensation for news content. Unlike Bill C-10, this should be an easy win for the new heritage minister; the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP all agree it should be done.
So get on with it, minister. Do what your party promised it would do.
The Liberals made over 100 promises. But only 10 came with a pledge to act within the first 100 days of a new mandate