So, the Government of Canada is not only the paymaster for Canada’s legacy media, but now also its bargaining agent?Details are sketchy — the ink on the deal is barely dry. However, it appears Google will continue to link to Canadian news, but rather than make payments directly to individual news outlets — an obvious administrative nightmare — Google will hand a $100 million cheque to the Government of Canada. Ottawa will then hand it along to some yet-to-be-agreed-upon collective that will make sure the right people get it... the rumour is that most of this money will go to the broadcast industry. If that turns out to be so, it would explain why Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s economic update two weeks ago included an unexpected $129 million bailout for print and digital media. They anticipated this deal.Exactly how the money will be distributed and who decides who gets what, are among the sketchy details yet to be determined. Presumably the regulations supporting the Bill C-18 legislation will define that.What are we to think?It is good that something got settled — anything that meant Canadians could continue to use a search engine to find news that mattered to them was a win. But this is all decidedly second-best.First, if this is a win — and Heritage Minister Pascal St-Onge is certainly trying to portray it that way — let us never taste defeat.To begin with, the industry thought it was going to pull $600 million out of Meta and Google. As things have turned out, they will get just $100 million from Google, nothing from Meta and have probably lost money they already had in commercial arrangements they once had with both.After all, Meta was once paying something to the news industry. It wasn't a lot compared to the embattled industry's needs; informed observers, reckon it to be in the order of $50 million. Those monies are now just lost, gone and forgotten. And, now that Google is to pay a flat fee of $100 million, any other side deals it may have had with Canadian newspapers — Google Showcase, for example — will also presumably be cancelled. It's not the Liberal way, but the minister should do the maths. Too many wins like this leads to bankruptcy.Second, Canadians have now experienced what it's like with Facebook carrying no news. Had they lost Google as well, we'd be back to word of mouth.Alright, a slight exaggeration. But, whether the industry likes it or not, things aren't what they used to be. They need to understand where they are in the process that connects the news desk to the reader these days. The news media thought they were getting ripped off because Meta and Google were carrying their products and convinced this feckless government that the tech giants should be made to pay. What they failed to realise was that in this brave new world of electronic distribution of information, Google and Meta are their paper boys. And they had just tried to send an invoice to their paper boys for the privilege of delivering their newspapers. Not surprisingly, the tech giants told them what Elon Musk told Disney.And so, the Canadian news industry finds its relationship with government, already compromised by the bail out program, further muddied by the Google shake down. Get it first but get it right, used to be the newsroom motto. To that, you can now add, ‘But don’t get us into trouble with the government.’After all, when the time comes to go cap in hand to Google for a raise, it's the government you need on your side now, isn't it?
