Canada Introduces Rules To Force Facebook, Google To Pay For News

Synopsis: After the closing of 450 news outlets all over Canada since 2008, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government is now expected to pass the new Online News Act. With this law, the Government is trying to help the news fraternity which is under a huge loss. 

Canada is poised to force tech giants like Facebook and Google to pay a share of profit with Canadian media which the companies earn from publishing their content. The Canadian Government has done some changes in the legislation according to which now the big tech giants will be paying the media houses for picking up and publishing their news content as same as the Australian Government who passed this landmark law last year. 

After the closing of 450 news outlets all over Canada since 2008, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government is now expected to pass the new Online News Act. With this law, the Government is trying to help the news fraternity which is under a huge loss. 

Regarding this new law, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told a news conference,

 The news sector in Canada is in crisis and this contributes to the heightened public mistrust and the rise of harmful disinformation in our society. We want to make sure that news outlets and journalists receive fair compensation for their work. We want to make sure that local independent news thrives in our country. It should be free.

Many Canadian Publishers are struggling financially and were pushing the Government for a very long time to come up with such a measure so that they can earn a bit of revenue as the foundation of their complete business has gone under the hands of global tech giants. 

The same law was first passed by the Australian Government, known as Australia’s New Media Bargaining Code order to provide justice to their media publishers. With the help of this code, the Government aimed at big companies like Google and Facebook to pay for using their news content. By regulating this order the Australians also accused the dominating companies of draining away the authenticity of the traditional news organization and using their complete content for free. Although the big tech firms opposed their decisions as they thought that this would be affecting their business, when the lawmakers passed the rule, everyone had to accept the same. 

As same as Australia, now Canada also wants compensation for its news sector.