Canada should follow Australia's example by forcing all tech platforms to pay for journalism

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By entering into negotiations with Ottawa, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has tacitly conceded that it needs news content and that it is valuable for Meta. You might think that, having conceded this, Meta would do what normal companies do and pay for this vital input to its business. Instead, Meta appears to be actively lobbying the Government of Canada to gut the Online News Act so that it can reinstate news on its services without having to pay for it. Having Canadian news back on Meta would be good, but not at the cost of massively damaging Canadian journalism.

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The idea behind the Online News Act came from Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). I do not claim to be an unbiased commentator on the NMBC. I was chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) when it conceived of the NMBC, and the ACCC was then charged by the Australian government with its implementation. At the time, it was seen as world-leading for allowing media businesses to bargain on broadly equal terms with dominant digital platforms who were otherwise paying little or nothing for the journalism that was an important input to their business models.

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