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Comment by mactavish88 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone quantified the financial impact on Canadian news outlets of Google and Meta’s blocking of news content due to Bill C-18?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/google-canada-online-news-1...

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I don't know if any data has been published. Michael Geist, a prominent Canadian lawyer who specializes in tech and media law and who manages an active blog on those topics in Canada, has published a good breakdown of the bill as it currently exists (it was essentially rewritten once a deal was made):

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/12/bill-c-18-is-dead-long-l...

The bill threw smaller orgs under the bus in favour of larger ones like Torstar and Postmedia, which is par for the course in Canada where the government frequently gives a helping hand to incumbents at the expense of challengers. We love our protectionism.

> The bill threw smaller orgs under the bus in favour of larger ones like Torstar and Postmedia

The bill was trying to protect what little media outlets Canada has left, few people were clicking through when the gist of the article was on Google.

You can’t argue that Canadian media orgs don’t require government protection when they’re all completely reliant on a single American company to provide them the right exposure.

I thought they had a problem with Canadians sharing news articles on Facebook, not searching for them on Google. Or maybe both?

This isn’t correct. News media can, if they want, completely restrict google/meta previews or even disable google. Meta/google are huge revenue drivers for media.

But through a complex narrative the media has pretended that google and meta take their money, and so they got the govt to blackmail google/meta.

It didn’t work with meta. The blocked news (one of the options the law allowed). The media squawked because this hurt them, while meta is doing fine.

Ultimately now CBC can’t share on meta, and lost any deals it had with google/meta. They’ll get a portion of Google’s $100 million and that’s it.

> The bill threw smaller orgs under the bus

That's not the way it appears to me. The bill caps the amount big orgs get, leaving a larger share of the pie to small orgs.

Unsure, but Google paid.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/google-online-news-act-1.70...

I wonder whether any of that cash has actually made its way to the CBC. Promises of future revenue are often hard to turn into salaries today.

It would be interesting if that was at all a confounding variable , one thing for sure is its impact has been under reported

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