They who shall not be named. Except in the case of Bill C-18, or the Online News Act.The federal government on Friday published the final regulations for the controversial law that will force online tech giants to pay for reposting links to online news content on their sites.The rules outline what is and what isn’t considered a news outlet, who gets what and who has to pay. And what exemptions they’re entitled to.No surprise, there is only one..Under the wording, “there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between an operator and news businesses only if the so-called ‘news intermediary’ is a ‘search engine’ that “during the previous calendar year, had an average of at least 20 million unique visitors in Canada per month” or $1 billion in revenues.Or, alternatively, a ‘social media service’ with the same attributes. But given that Facebook parent company Meta has already followed through with its threats to block Canadian news content, that only leaves one ‘search engine’ in question.And it’s given an exemption. .“In the case of the digital news intermediary that is the search engine with the greatest share of Canadian Internet advertising revenues among all search engines in respect of which the Act applies, the Commission must interpret the agreements as contributing to the sustainability of the Canadian news marketplace if and only if, for each year covered by the potential exemption order, the agreements provide for monetary compensation” in accordance with a formula that multiplies $100 million by the prevailing consumer price index as of January 1 2023.What’s just as confusing is who actually gets that money.“The equitable distribution of monetary compensation is to be determined, subject to subsection (3), having regard to the number of full-time equivalent employees who, in the previous calendar year, were employed by each news business for the purpose of producing, for news outlets operated by that business, original news content that is intended to be made available online.”.Again, another exemption.“No more than 30% of the monetary compensation may be allocated to news businesses — other than the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — that carry on a programming undertaking as defined in… the Broadcasting Act, in relation to news outlets that are or are part of a broadcasting undertaking as defined in that subsection, and no more than 7% of the monetary compensation may be allocated to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.”If that wasn’t clear enough, a “news outlet” means a news outlet that is “operated exclusively for the purpose of producing news content… whose news content is made available by the digital news intermediary in question.”According to media critic Michael Geist “Bill C-18 is dead, long live Bill C-18.”In a post on his website and on Twitter (“X”), Geist said the Feds have basically thrown smaller news outlets “under the bus” at the expense of bigger — and flailing — media giants like PostMedia and Torstar.“The combined effect of this regulation should be obvious: excluding some smaller and ethnic outlets altogether while reserving most of the remaining money for larger entities such as Torstar or Postmedia who employ more journalist-adjacent personnel (and who incidentally lobbied the most for the legislation).”Still, in a backhanded compliment, he described it as a “compromise” that effectively guts what it was intended to do.“It means the government has not only negotiated the actual payment but now largely determined how the money will be allocated, eliminated provisions that only months ago were deemed essential and literally created a regulation exempting a single company,” he wrote.
