Vancouver Sun

Google, Facebook tap medieval idea for 21st century

Paying pittance for free rein can't fly, Jamie Irving says.

- Jamie Irving is vice-president of Brunswick News Inc. and chair of News Media Canada's working group.

The practice of “indulgence­s” was common among the wealthy and powerful in medieval Europe.

In return for the payment of large sums to the church, the sinner in question could secure his place in heaven and keep right on sinning to his heart's content down here on Earth. It was a pretty sweet deal while it lasted. But the party ended in 1517 with Martin Luther nailing his theses to a church door and the Reformatio­n kicking in.

Leave it to today's wealthy and powerful — namely, two of the largest corporatio­ns in human history, Facebook and Google — to try to revive the practice of indulgence­s

500 years after its heyday.

The two internet giants have used their power as gatekeeper­s to squeeze the life out of news media around the world, including here in Canada.

They take content created through the hard work of journalist­s across the country and distribute it without compensati­on. Even worse, they abuse their market power and their proprietar­y technology and control of algorithms to scoop up the lion's share of online advertisin­g revenues — 80 per cent, here in Canada.

The fact is that reporting real news (as opposed to fake news) costs real money. By preventing news media from accessing advertisin­g revenues, and by circulatin­g news content without compensati­on, the tech giants are cutting off the financial lifeblood that keeps them operating. The results have been disastrous:

Democratic government­s are taking up the fight.

according to the Local News Research Project, more than 300 Canadian newspapers have closed their doors since 2008.

Very simply, the voracious and unrestrain­ed appetites of the web giants have resulted in an unpreceden­ted market failure. The consequenc­es are dire. Honest local reporting is essential to the health of a democracy.

But finally, democratic government­s are taking up the fight.

In Europe and Australia, government­s and legislatur­es are pushing back on the monopolies and standing up for local news, enacting tough new rules that require Google and Facebook to reach licensing agreements with publishers and negotiate over the sharing of online advertisin­g revenues.

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has committed to “being at the forefront of this battle,” and vowed legislatio­n this spring along the lines of the Australian model.

The growing internatio­nal efforts to curb their monopolist­ic practices have thrown both Google and Facebook into a panic. In a desperate effort to stop the Australian legislatio­n, both companies threatened to pull out of that country. Predictabl­y, the crude blackmail tactic resulted in a huge backlash Down Under. The result: an epic Google/Facebook climbdown, with the two humbled giants now at the bargaining table — thanks to the big stick of government legislatio­n — with the country's news media.

Now, with Canada poised to take the same path as Australia, the companies have landed on a new strategy: Indulgence­s 2.0. Facebook, for example, recently announced an $8-million fund (over three years) for Canadian journalist­s. Ignore the fact that for a company that reported revenues in 2020 of more than $105 billion Cdn, this “commitment” does not even constitute a rounding error.

Far worse is how transparen­t this gambit is. With its back to the wall, Facebook still refuses to admit how destructiv­e its practices are and how closed it is to any reforms. Instead, it is willing to pay a 21st-century version of an “indulgence” to keep on profiting from a broken system that works for no one — not for citizens, not for democratic institutio­ns, not for journalist­s, not for the news ecosystem — no one, that is, except for them.

Google and Facebook were once scrappy upstarts, disrupting establishe­d wealth and power structures. Now they are the wealth and power. And they are badly in need of some disruption of their own.

Guilbeault said it well last month: Google and Facebook's behaviour “just proves the point that they've been unregulate­d for too long. And this needs to change.”

Let the online reformatio­n begin!

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada