00:02:20.040They're trying to say that when Google shows you search results and they have a little top stories bar that shows you all of the things that, oh, I don't know, the National Post has done or CBT News has done, that that is tantamount to theft of journalist content and that they need to pay their fair share for using or stealing that content.
00:02:42.180And when you say it out loud, it sounds rather absurd, and I'm not even trying to spin it in an uncharitable light here, because that's essentially what the government is claiming, that tech companies are stealing content from journalists.
00:02:57.080The same goes to Facebook and Twitter.
00:02:59.220So when you log on to Facebook and you see,
00:03:02.140oh, what do you know, True North has written this story
00:03:04.600and that looks interesting, I'm going to click on that.
00:03:22.220And every time this claim has come up,
00:03:25.120It's been clear, and social media companies have showed their numbers on this, that media consumption, like news consumption, is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of their overall usage and revenue.
00:03:38.560I mean, people in the media industry tend to have this overly inflated sense of self-worth when they talk about how important they are and the work that they do on a regular basis.
00:03:48.360In reality, most people would be just as happy watching family feud highlights and cat memes when they log onto social media and not perhaps learning about federal politics or the China scandal or whatever Joe Biden said or anything like that.
00:04:03.420Most people do not actually live and breathe this stuff like I do and like many of you do and like we all may wish the general population did.
00:04:10.920So the thing that I find interesting here is that there is just a fundamental overestimation of the value of news content to social media companies and to tech companies here, and that's really what's undergirding Bill C-10, which I think is a terribly, terribly bad bill.
00:04:32.480and the thing that is particularly noteworthy here is that it's been tried elsewhere notably
00:04:37.660in australia and facebook then was the one that really took this tough position and facebook said
00:04:44.020we are not going to let you share news links on our platform and eventually the government backed
00:04:50.640off a little bit of the bill and facebook backed off of its protest for whatever reason and i've
00:04:56.080never actually gotten to the bottom of this uh when this happened my website which doesn't have
00:05:02.280much going on because I don't use I don't update it regularly it's not like my sub stack but my
00:05:06.240website andrewlaughton.ca.ca as in like a Canadian domain name was somehow viewed as Australian by
00:05:14.260Facebook and I don't know how I don't know why but you I could not share links to my own website
00:05:20.100while this was going on and it was particularly unfortunate because I had been like a big
00:05:25.280supporter of what Facebook had done and I said yeah you know power to Facebook good for this
00:05:29.420protest. And then I'm like, okay, I'm with you guys, but can you let me like, you know, post
00:05:32.580stuff on my Facebook again? And eventually I was able to. So be careful what you wish for is the
00:05:38.060line here. Brian Passifiume in the National Post had a column where he was actually not as a
00:05:43.340journalist, but as a Google user, one of the ones that's in this now test group that Google is doing
00:05:49.400in Canada of blocking access to news content. So he can now actually not even search for his own
00:05:56.900content his own written work using google unless he logs out of his account or opens up an incognito
00:06:04.320browser or something like that i didn't get the specifics but he basically is now blocked from
00:06:09.140doing his job as a journalist because google is making its play against the government now now
00:06:14.500it's easy to look at google and say well you know these big tech companies they censor people they
00:06:20.000manipulate what we see through the algorithms and all of that and fair fair enough i don't expect
00:06:25.660anyone to whitewash big tech. But right now we're talking about big tech versus big government. And
00:06:31.600even if I don't like either of them in different contexts, when the two are together, I'm going to
00:06:37.440side with big tech. I'm going to side at the very least against big government. And really what's
00:06:44.080happening here is the government is trying to say that big tech needs to subsidize big media.
00:06:48.920and why this is at all within the purview of the government or big tech to subsidize is another
00:06:56.740discussion entirely but we'll certainly touch on themes of it here and I want to welcome to the
00:07:02.660show and it's actually been I should say mea culpa far too long that I have not had this man on and
00:07:09.080there's no reason for it it's just because C11 has come and gone C10 has come and gone and I've
00:07:14.340wanted to have Peter Menzies on for quite some time and we figured out that we should not wait
00:07:18.920any further. He joins us now, the former vice chair of the CRTC or a former vice chair and also
00:07:24.600a researcher fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Peter, good to talk to you, sir.
00:07:29.740Thanks for coming on today. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for choosing me.
00:07:35.540Well, no, it's more magical than that. Your work obviously rises to the top on this because
00:07:41.800relatively few people are speaking out about this at least at the outset it's gotten a little bit
00:07:47.760more uh now in in the terms of people speaking up but let's just start with the fundamental
00:07:53.600premise here you know my summation of this is that government is essentially looking at tech
00:07:58.360companies and saying you now have to subsidize media companies but there's a weird sort of
00:08:04.220double speak going on here because when government puts forward a bill like c18 they say you're
00:08:10.440stealing content that's effectively the claim and then when google says okay we're gonna you know
00:08:15.700no longer show that content it's all you're blocking content well well which is it are they
00:08:20.240are they stealing content that's not theirs to use or are they blocking content that is supposed to
00:08:24.460be on the platform nobody is stealing anything from anybody the traditional media have lost
00:08:31.480something they've lost a lot they've lost advertising and they've lost it because of a
00:08:36.200technological revolution pretty much on the same scale as the invention of the printing press
00:08:41.480so um the an industry that survived for 200 years or so newspapers uh can no longer produce
00:08:49.860profitably with their uh in the current environment right the what happened is tech came the internet
00:08:57.320came along all kinds of things happened kijiji and craigslist stole all the uh all the classified
00:09:03.560advertising then facebook launched and other other people launched and that's where people
00:09:09.040went to have fun and advertisers will go where people's eyeballs are and that's where people's
00:09:13.860eyeballs are so uh traditional media lost a lot of advertising revenue and basically they they
00:09:20.860approached the government and said we lost our avid our our advertising revenue somebody must
00:09:26.320have stolen it from us right and the government said who has your advertising revenue and they
00:09:32.240said big tech and they said we'll go and get it back for you right which is you know i mean this
00:09:39.000analogy is used a lot but it's but it's it's the one that works for people it's it's like telling
00:09:44.640automobile companies that they have to subsidize horse and carriages right something new has come
00:09:51.540along that is better now that said government may wish to um declare journalism to be a public good
00:09:59.820of some kind and try to make some sort of arrangement and that sort of stuff and tech
00:10:04.280companies you know there are issues with them they are big they dominate things and they may
00:10:10.120have too much market power for media to be able to get a fair deal that's worth looking at but in
00:10:16.200terms of anybody stealing something nobody's stolen something in terms of google google's
00:10:21.820experiments with what are we going to do if this bill passes and basically what happened is if
00:10:28.580I typed Andrew Lawton into the search tool, a whole bunch of Andrew Lawtons would come up,
00:10:36.540but True North wouldn't, right? So no news links associated with Andrew Lawton would show up.
00:10:45.320Your articles wouldn't show up and that sort of stuff. Your LinkedIn page might, if you have one,
00:10:51.200and that sort of stuff. But here's the solution for Brian Passifield. When I read his piece,
00:10:56.520i thought use another search engine yeah right yeah and and he he sort of gets to that point
00:11:02.600near the end of it you know because he wasn't actually i was hoping he would come out with
00:11:05.940this really kind of big political point but he made more of a human point in his thing which is
00:11:10.020that we've become far too reliant on this and and you know i'm a chrome user generally but
00:11:14.600we all forget that there are other browsers out there we forget there are other search engines
00:11:19.120out there even if google is now we do the verb that we use as a stand-in for to search in a search
00:11:24.260engine yeah and and it's a good reminder um for that because google may have to go down that road
00:11:29.800right and a lot of it has to do with the structure of bill c18 google did roughly the same sort of
00:11:39.240thing it's not perfectly analogous but it was a copyright legislation matter in spain
00:11:46.020and they did not link to news for eight years in spain that issue just got resolved last summer
00:11:52.900after Spain made some adjustments to their,
00:12:14.400but if the bill goes through as it is,
00:12:19.580they will probably have to make a decision,
00:12:21.360And some of that decision will be, well, if we get out of the news search business in Canada, how much business are we actually losing?
00:12:28.480How many users are we going to lose to Bing or other search engines?
00:12:32.800You know, that might not be a bad thing when you think about it.
00:12:35.020I mean, Google's got about close to 90% of the market.
00:12:39.180If they stop doing something that caused somebody else to get a little bit more of the market, that might be a good thing.
00:12:46.720Apple's working on a search tool, so it's not the end of the world.
00:12:50.320when when you bring up google i it's it's odd that i instinctively put it in a somewhat different
00:12:56.680category and not wrongfully i mean it's a private corporation they offer products people use those
00:13:01.640products and uh so on and i use many of them myself you know facebook and twitter though
00:13:06.520are more we we define facebook and twitter more as being user generated i post you read you post
00:13:14.260I read. And so on Google, we almost view as something that is a public good. And, you know, for example, a Gmail address, which most people have or many people have or some variation of it.
00:13:25.520You don't own that. Someone could theoretically at any time say you don't get to have your email address anymore and shut it off and you would have very little recourse.
00:13:33.920But it is still at the end of the day, a private company and not a public good.
00:13:37.360And it's right now, despite how powerful and wealthy it is, being forced to do something that the government wants to do, which is subsidize Canadian news media.
00:13:47.960Yeah, well, I mean, it is a public, it's a public, it's a private company, publicly traded, right?
00:13:55.480It will behave, they are rational people running and they will behave rationally and in the best interest of their shareholders.
00:14:03.380This bill, the way it's written with, there's no cap on it, right?
00:14:07.220there's no there's no height on it if somebody could probably go to google and said hey this
00:14:11.700will cost you 100 million bucks they might go hmm do a little math okay right there's no more right
00:14:19.140100 million bucks and we're done right they might do that but the problem with bill c18 is there's
00:14:24.260no limit right and some of the some of the people expecting to get cash um you know some of the
00:14:30.740broadcasters particularly have very very high expectations and a lot of the news companies
00:14:37.220have a very flattering view of their popularity online it's difficult for them to understand that
00:14:46.740actually nobody really makes very much money if any money on them right i bet you you could probably
00:14:53.860get one of those companies facebook or google to give 100 of the money they make either from the
00:15:03.460data that they gather from the from from the postings or from any advertising that they
00:15:11.140generate themselves because all they do is send people to the company's web page right
00:15:17.460if if the national post posts something on facebook people click on that link and they
00:15:22.500go to they go to the national post page right so but they could probably give them 100 of the money
00:15:27.700there and if the government is really that the government can do a couple of things it can
00:15:33.060come up with some sort of reasonable accommodation for this right if nobody that i've read in in the
00:15:40.500big tech side is saying no way are we going to do something they seem to recognize that they've got
00:15:45.940some reputation management to do here they they they didn't want to kill journalism it's kind of
00:15:52.740like oops you know like sorry guys um we didn't mean to kill you um and we think you know we don't
00:16:00.100want to wear that so they're they're trying to do something to help but you know if the government
00:16:05.700can behave reasonably with c18 or just not even do a c18 and come up with something else come up
00:16:12.180with what i've suggested the country needs is really a national policy for news organizations
00:16:21.220there's nothing going on right now that talks like that the bill c18 will what it'll end up doing
00:16:29.860according to the senate leader when he introduced bill c18 in the senate he said this will cover
00:16:35.62035 percent of newsroom costs in canada okay so great what do we get out of that we get a news
00:16:42.420industry that owes that has is 35 of its newsroom costs dependent on offshore monster tech companies
00:16:54.340right and it has that and only a handful of them at that that's right and it has that thanks to
00:17:02.340the government. What are the two biggest threats that people would see in their lives to their
00:17:09.300independence and freedom? Big tech and big government, right? And all of a sudden, you've
00:17:14.600got your media dependent on both. So you need to come up with some kind of structure, and government
00:17:20.940policy can be involved in this, that makes sure you have an independent media thriving and adapting
00:17:27.400to this technological revolution we're going through. It's going to be, and you're going to
00:17:31.720have to accept that some are going to die right some of the old standards like many have the
00:17:38.600you know the moose job moose job newspaper died five years ago but you can you know if you if you
00:17:45.960look search for news and moose job you can find four websites delivering news the news hasn't
00:17:51.140gone away the platform that delivered it went away because it wasn't a good fit for the 21st century
00:17:58.420People, I find, and this gets into a bit of a different discussion,
00:18:01.340but people are very selective about what things they choose to sentimentalize.
00:18:06.620I mean, even if you look at the early days of the Internet,
00:18:08.580there are a lot of companies that were part of that first wave,
00:18:11.660Trailblazers, your MySpaces, your Napsters, that are now nothing.
00:18:15.960And, you know, obviously that's more on a micro level,
00:18:18.180but it's not the responsibility of the successful companies to say,
00:18:22.140well, you know what, we built off of them, so we have to keep them going.
00:18:25.520And no one seems to want to talk about or have a solution for how do we make a new business model that is not dependent on all of these externalities.
00:18:38.880I'm not saying that individual outlets have not done it.
00:18:41.580But as a sort of that macro level, the comments that we see from the National News Media Council, they're not talking about innovation in the least.
00:18:49.980No, and I mean, if you read Facebook's response after 12 months of them paying out in Australia,
00:21:03.580All right, yourself as well, Peter Menzies.
00:21:05.020You can catch up with him at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and he tends to pop up in many other venues as well.
00:21:11.780You know, I'm going to talk about this a little bit more.
00:21:14.180I mean, just to put a bow on it and not a nice looking bow by any stretch.
00:21:18.940There's a wholesale assault on Internet freedom right now that this government is responsible for.
00:21:25.120And you can combine Bill C-18 with Bill C-11 with the former Bill C-36, which will be at some point coming back.
00:21:33.040And I think there's a private member's bill from, believe it or not, I think it's from Kevin Vuong that tries to do what C36 was going to do.
00:21:40.080And that's the one that talks about online hate speech and forcing social media companies to take things down and all of that.
00:21:46.740And all of these things the government is saying are about modernizing.
00:21:50.940But it's very peculiar, perhaps not actually, but it's very noteworthy that government views modernization as centralization.
00:22:01.000The government views increasing its own control, its own authority, expanding its authority is part and parcel of modernizing.
00:22:08.920And I don't think modernization needs to be that.
00:30:11.660to indulge me on that I did want to talk just a little bit in the remaining few minutes of the
00:30:17.100program about what's happening in the China file today this is the scandal that keeps on unfolding
00:30:23.600I don't want to say keeps on giving because uh well basically the Chinese Politburo is the gift
00:30:27.980that keeps on giving to the liberals uh this one was great that they wanted to build a statue to
00:30:33.360Mao in Montreal and that I think was even a little too on the nose for Justin Trudeau he said okay
00:30:38.580hang on i'm okay with uh you know you guys mucking around in the elections but don't don't make us
00:30:43.720look at the statue of mao in montreal i mean montreal wouldn't have liked that at all because
00:30:47.920it would have uh well violated probably bill 21 or something but anyway so the thing that's
00:30:54.060fascinating here is the national security advisor to justin trudeau jody thomas who has become a bit
00:30:59.860of a mainstay in canadian politics with her comments on the freedom convoy her comments and
00:31:04.800sorts of other things lately but jody thomas was testifying before parliament and she acknowledged
00:31:09.920that cesus gave the trudeau government and gave trudeau multiple briefings on election interference
00:31:19.120how many times was the prime minister briefed about beijing's interference in the 2019 and 2021
00:31:27.360elections the prime minister would have been briefed on foreign interference in the elections
00:31:32.240multiple times between 2019 and 2021 and 2022. We will endeavor to get you those dates.
00:31:41.920So you will undertake to provide the dates and the agencies and those involved in briefing
00:31:49.760the Prime Minister? We will endeavor to get the dates for you. Every instance that he was briefed
00:31:55.280in respect of Beijing's election. I will do my best but again I was not in this job at the time.
00:32:02.240Okay. So that's fairly specific. She's saying, I'm going to need to get the dates to you and
00:32:08.660we'll send those over by fax at the earliest convenience, maybe 2037. But yeah, multiple
00:32:15.360briefings, multiple briefings Justin Trudeau got on election interference. Now, this struck me as
00:32:20.420a little odd at first because I recall Justin Trudeau denying he was given any such briefings.
00:32:25.640There was this comment in the House of Commons not that long ago.
00:32:32.240The question is, has he been briefed since November 7th about whether or not a foreign power funnelled money to Canadian federal candidates, yes or no?
00:34:40.040that was how people took his answers at the time.
00:34:43.480He said, no, no, no, no one's ever briefing on that one specific thing.
00:34:47.100So it would strike me that there's a little bit of wordplay there and that odd that CSIS and all of its many briefings, its multiple briefings.
00:34:54.500I didn't mention that, yeah, there were some financial resources going towards candidates here.
00:34:58.700I wonder if he was briefed on the donation to the Trudeau Foundation.
00:35:04.560So I asked in the title of the show yesterday if this would be the end of Trudeau.
00:35:08.780And I caution that we have had political career-ending scandals from this government, like the Aga Khan Island vacation, like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, like the WE Charity scandal.
00:35:21.140And all of them have proven to have reduced Trudeau's exterior, not to the shine of blackface, but to a hard nonstick Teflon coating.
00:35:31.300So I don't believe we should say at face value that this would be any different.
00:35:35.680In fact, the NDP would probably love to have a tight relationship with China, although even they are coming out right now and saying we need a public inquiry, maybe because they know a public inquiry is going to take years, it's going to release an ambiguous report, and they will still be able to keep the supply and confidence agreement.
00:35:52.180You're not allowed to call it a coalition government.
00:35:54.600The supply and confidence agreement going until the next election would be anyway.
00:35:58.020So I wouldn't even hold out too much optimism that even the NDP is ready to get serious with the Liberals on this.
00:36:05.320More of this in the days and weeks ahead.
00:36:07.220You can catch all of that at truenorthtnc.news.
00:36:09.840And if you are minded to support the work that we do,
00:36:12.840which as you heard from Peter Menzies,
00:36:14.980we've got to get some innovation in the media sector.