Tech Won't Save Us - Google and Meta Are Fighting with Canada w/ David Moscrop

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by David Moscrop to discuss Canada’s plan to make Google and Meta pay news publishers, and what might happened now that they’re threatening to pull Canadian news from their platforms. David Moscrop is a freelance writer and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy?: Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones. Follow David on Twitter at @David_Moscrop.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:David Moscrop wrote about the larger context of the Online News Bill in his Substack newsletter.Paris also wrote about Google and Meta threatening to pull news in Canada and why Canada should take a hard line with them.Sandy Garossino wrote about how much money Google and Meta extract from Canada.Media conglomerates Postmedia and Nordstar are in talks to merge.California is also looking at a similar process to force Google and Meta to pay media in that state.On Wednesday, the Canadian government pulled advertising from Facebook and Instagram, but said Google was still talking to find a way forward. The government said it won’t back down, and two opposition parties — the New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois — voiced their support.Support the show

There are no heroes here at the end of the day. I don't really like anybody. It's like, it's hard to like the tech giants. It's hard to like the government's poor crafting of the bill. And it's hard to like some of these media giants who legacy folks are extracting value for shareholders. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to save journalism, but, you know, they're trying to pay bonuses to their bosses and dividends to their shareholders.

So I'm just like, okay, well, I don't like anybody here. It's everyone's bad. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is David Moskrop. David is a freelance writer who writes for a number of publications, including the Globe and Mail and the Washington Post. He's also the author of Too Dumb for Democracy, Why We Make Bad Political Decisions, and How We Can Make Better Ones. Now in this week's episode, we'll be talking a bit about Canada. You know, the country that I'm from, maybe you're saying, Paris, I don't really care what's going on in Canada. And I would say, well, that's pretty mean. But luckily, I said that you didn't say that. So we're still okay. But you might have

heard that Google and Meta are threatening to take news content off of their platforms in Canada, in response to a new bill called C18, or the online news bill that would require them to pay Canadian news publishers in order to have Canadian news on their platforms, right? And the idea is that people using the platforms, whether it's Google search or whether, you know, it's just scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, see Canadian news and the platforms benefit from having that news on their platforms and the platforms benefit from having the news on their platforms. And the platforms benefit from having the news there. So since journalism is struggling, the government is saying, okay, platforms, American companies, you should have to compensate the news publishers for the journalism that you're hosting and

that kind of people are talking about on your platforms that's driving engagement and whatnot. This is obviously following on what Australia did a couple of years ago. But the platforms clearly do not want to abide by this type of rule, and in particular, the specific regulations that are in this bill that would ensure that there's more transparency than what happened in the Australian case. So I think that this is an important issue to discuss because it touches on a number of themes that we often talk about, you know, on the show, you know, on the one hand, it's kind of the power that these major platform companies can wield, especially when they're outside of the United States in, you know, other countries where they operate countries that might have less power to regulate them or to, you know, try to force them to abide by the rules of that country because they are based in the United States and ultimately they can pull out of different markets if it doesn't suit them. But also ongoing discussions around the regulation of technology and, you know, what governments should be able to do in regards

to these major tech companies. And specifically, it seems like this model of expecting platforms to pay news publishers is something that is expanding, right? We saw it in Australia a couple of years ago. We've seen movements along the same lines in Europe. We have this process that's ongoing in Canada, and we're going to see how it plays out. And we also see California talking about moving in this direction as well. And surely if California does so, then more states and potentially other countries will follow through on that as well. So the tech companies in this moment are seeing that there are a lot of potential governments that are about to make claims on their revenues and expect them to contribute more to news and journalism, and they really don't want to have to do that.

So I think that this is a really interesting conversation. David and I certainly talk about things that are happening in Canada, but we try to make sure that we give the Canadian context so that if you're not in Canada, you will still be able to follow along with the various things that we're talking about. And maybe some of the reasons that Canada wants to pursue policies like this because of its kind of unique political and cultural circumstances that might be a bit different from what you see in the United States, for example. So I was really happy to have David on the show. And if you like our conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so we can keep having these critical conversations on a range of tech topics, including places outside the United States. You can join

supporters like Jeff Begley in Canton de Hadley, Quebec, Sam from Chico, California, and Gunda from Cologne in Germany by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. David, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. You know, it's great to have another Canadian on the show, discuss some Canadian issues. It's been a little while. You know, Canada doesn't always have big tech things that I feel like the world needs to know about. But I think this one is something that people are watching. And so it's good to have you on the show to chat about it. Oh, it's great to be here. And you know what's great about this Canadian issue is,

is for once, it's a Canadian issue that actually matters for the rest of the world. So it's not just a little parochial Canadian thing. It's actually a front on the global battlefield on the future of tech. So it's a twofer. Absolutely. And that's what we like. So let's dig into it, right? I'm sure people maybe saw some stories recently about Google and Meta threatening to pull news in Canada. And that's in response to a recent bill called C-18 or the online news bill. How would you describe this to the audience? And what is the motivation behind it? So the idea had originally come from Australia. And the premise behind it is the government is going to induce the big tech companies,

which is largely to say Meta and Google, to pay money to support legacy media, primarily legacy media. And they're going to do that by forcing them, that's what it is, compelling them to sign agreements with these media companies, either bilaterally or, if the companies prefer, multilaterally to support journalism in the country. And the whole thing is sort of backed by this primary premise that the transformation of digital technology and digital media has eroded the traditional media advertising model, which was never perfect. It was never enough for some media outlets. But since the arrival of Google and Meta, it's effectively

fallen out. Now they get the vast majority of the ad dollars. The media companies don't get to do that. They don't get to run classifieds anymore. And they need some money. And there's a whole giant pile of money over here and so the government's going to ensure that they get some of theirs i think that's a really good way of describing it right basically the government is looking seeing that there's all this cash in these foreign tech giants that you know kind of dominate how we interact with and access information these days and we also see on the other hand that the journalism industry in canada but in many other parts of the world is really struggling right now. And so they're saying, okay, how are we going to

address this? And they also see the example of the Australians who did it back in 2021. And you know, it's worked out like decently well down there. But I would also say the other piece there is that the media are pushing for this as well. They also see what came out of Australia and want to move forward with that. So I guess, can you talk to us a bit about what is going on in the Canadian media right now, the difficulties that it's facing and why they might want to replicate this Australian model that we have seen kind of already happened down there? I mean, the Canadian media, usually I'd say it's a shit show, but it's actually kind of a shit show with some

green shoots. I try to think because I don't want to erase the fact that there are a number of great independent, typically incidentally left, independent media outlets who are doing very, very good work. They are the green shoots. There are independent places that aren't taking federal money. They don't want Fed money or they don't want Google meta money. They're making a go of it largely, in some cases, primarily through the support of their patrons and readers. So that's group A. There's kind of group B in the middle. And then there's group C,

which is the legacy outlets. That's the big shit show. And it is a bunch of large corporations who, as large corporations want to do, wish to extract as much value from both the public and the state as possible. So this is one way of doing it. And those legacy outlets in some cases are, say, owned by a foreign hedge fund they may be trying to merge with others as is the case right now with um post media and norris star who owns the toronto star so now they're trying to effectively reduce the ownership to a couple of companies absolutely and it's probably worth saying there that the media industry is already heavily consolidated post media owns many of kind of the newspapers that are left, kind of, you know, the regional or kind of city newspapers that are left, as well as some national ones like the National

Post. And then Nordstar, as you say, is the Toronto Star and some other ones. But they have also in the past few years been kind of swapping newspapers to close some down. There's already been this process of further cuts to Canadian media and their merger is kind of looking at furthering that again, right? Yeah. And they talk about, you know, well, it's going to, you know, more efficiencies and blah, blah, blah, but we know what's going to happen. People get fired and they're going to shut down newspapers. That's what happens every single time this happens. So that's what they're doing.

But in the meantime, they get to try to extract a lot of value. And keep in mind, the state already supports these outlets in a number of ways. There's like a journalism funding program, I where over, say, half of the editorial budget for a legacy outlet is coming from handouts from the state and from Meta and Google. So to put that in perspective now, these companies absolutely need these deals because they require them to operate. So they want the money because if not they can't afford to operate incidentally the same kind of newspapers in some cases talking look at you post media that will turn around and bitch about socialism and lazy workers need to get off their ass to go and blah blah meanwhile half their costs are funded by give or take by my other companies and by the government so So that's the state of the battleground right now. Irony is not dead, or maybe it is dead. Yeah, it's in a really bad

place, right? And it's fascinating you say that because yeah, post media is largely this like right wing media chain that really loves to support conservatives and all this kind of stuff, yet loves the public subsidies and stuff for their business model to keep them going and to keep funding as you say the u.s head fund that owns them and that loaded them up with debt that it's using a lot of that money to pay back right yeah and i'll say if people love when that happens people will say well you know it's it's capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich and i'm like no no no That's just capitalism. That is how contemporary capitalism operates. It's very much an extractive industry where these private for-profit

corporations are taking everything they can from their workers, but also from the state, while also saying that workers ought to not be so lazy and take so much from the government. Yeah, an essential point. And I was just going to add as well that maybe people who aren't Canadians would not be familiar, but Canada also has quite a history of kind of cultural protectionism, right? And the idea that your media is going to be owned by foreign entities is not something that is very familiar in Canada. Same with telecom companies and things like that. We generally don't allow much foreign ownership of those sorts of industries. But in the case of PostMedia, the reason why it's owned by this US hedge fund or largely owned by it is that the previous government before Justin Trudeau was in power was Stephen Harper's Conservatives, and they were the ones who kind of allowed that deal to go through because usually something like that would not have been approved. And so that is another reason why we're kind of saddled with the situation that we're in today. Yeah, there was a long battle in Canada that prior to the kind of free trade agreement and then the North American free trade agreement

of the 80s and 90s, where there was a media backlash and an intellectual backlash and a political backlash against opening up the country because the argument was, well, as soon as you do that, the Yankees are going to swarm in and we're just going to become the 51st state. And that was what animated a lot of people. You know, Mordecai Richler was incidentally on the other side of that. I'll tell you a great little Mordecai Richler story. He was once on CBC debating Rick Salutin on free trade and his argument, Salutin was like a cultural protectionist.

And Mordecai Richler says, if free trade means that the dubious wines of the Niagara region will be displaced by the much more palatable rinds of California, that I'm for free trade because there's only so much I can drink for my country of the Napa Valley. So that's why Mordecai Richler was open to free trade. But that was the battleground. And that was for a long time, the struggle in Canada was to be preserved. We need to resist the Americanization of the country. And I think particularly once the internet really caught on, that was just kind of over. There are remnants of it. Bill C-11, which was a bill that was trying to boost Canadian content in the country by requiring platforms and streaming services to surface that content, a bit of a reflection of that cultural protectionism.

But by and large, that war, I think, is over and the sort of open market Americanization has probably won. Yeah, there was a lot of that pushback to Bill C-11, which is also called the Online Streaming Bill, which essentially updates existing broadcasting rules that we've had for decades in Canada that say broadcasters need to show a certain amount of Canadian content and need to contribute to a fund where it's helping to create more Canadian content. Now, streaming services need to abide by those rules as well. And we've yet to see exactly what that is specifically going to look like because we're still waiting on the regulator to release the final rules. But yeah, you could definitely see that in the argument of the debate that was happening around that bill as well,

where you had a lot of people who were defending the idea of extending these regulations to streaming companies because this is the way it works in Canada. And a lot of people saying this doesn't make any sense. Why are we still having Canadian content requirements, et cetera, et cetera. And so you can see that that fault line is still there and is still kind of present, which makes sense. I think when you're a country that is next to such a large kind of cultural superpower, like the United States, but we also recognize that like most people in Canada are watching a ton of American movies and TV shows and like watching CNN and MSNBC and all that stuff like all the time, maybe even more than

they're watching CBC or CTV. So unfortunately, that's just the reality that we find ourselves in. Yeah, and it's been a long time coming. And I was sort of torn on that it's going to depend again on what it looks like. And we just don't know, as you mentioned, what it's going to look like yet. And there was a real kerfuffle because a lot of the opponents said, are you going to apply this to individual content creators? Because some of these folks have massive audiences and they've got millions of folks who are tuning into them. Are you going to apply it to them? And the answer was, no, no, trust us. We won't. And they've since said, no, no, we won't and they've since said no no we won't but that is a regulatory decision that could change right so there was concern over kind of individual

creators and how it's going to affect them and a lot of anxiety there but again it does speak to this idea that the country is still nervous at some level about creeping americanization and probably always will be even though it's pretty much happened. There's a few bulwarks. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the state broadcaster, is one of them. Also, it's a battlefield. But the Online News Act has now gotten to the point where the battle has shifted to the future of the internet as it relates to these massive tech companies who don't want their turf further impeded on and so the that whole you can draw a line between that cultural battle and the free trade battles all the way through to this

current battle where as i described in a substack post i wrote is a turf battle and it's the kind of the newest turf battle but a pretty big one that could then set the stage for further battles, like Australia set the stage for this one. Absolutely. And I think just to pick up on a couple things you said about the streaming bill as well. Like I would say I was very supportive of that because I love the idea that we're going to force these companies to like show Canadian content, even if Canadians don't want to watch it. But like at least it's there and it's being promoted on the homepages and whatever, because I think that's important for some stupid reason. But I also find it interesting,

though, to look at like the streaming provisions. And obviously, you know, this is moving forward in Canada. We've seen it moving forward in France as well, where they're doing something like that. And in the way that we are kind of copying what the Australians are doing with the news bill, I saw a few months ago that the Australians are like, we're going to look at some Australian content requirements on streaming services. It's like, oh, maybe they're like copying us a little bit too with that one. But the other thing I was going to say, because you mentioned the CBC, was that we do still have like the public broadcaster, which obviously the US has PBS and NPR and things, but it works a little bit differently. Like CBC, I think it's fair to say

is much more influential in Canada than those broadcasters would be in the United States. But the other piece of it is, and I was talking to some people in Germany about this as well recently, is that I feel like on the CBC, you get a lot more kind of US news that they are covering on it. You get them kind of even framing Canadian news much more through Americanized lenses and the lenses of Canadian issues. And when I was talking to folks in Germany, they were like, yeah, we see that in our news as well. Like our news is always talking about Trump and whatnot, instead of like what's happening domestically. And so you see that kind of bleeding, I guess, even into the local news,

the stuff that's supposed to be representing the non-U.S. country that is not like the U.S. media necessarily, but is still kind of picking that up. Yeah. And to give listeners a sense of scale, a couple of years ago, CBC, through appropriations from the government and through ads because they run ads and through subscriptions, surpassed, for its budget, all of the newspapers in the country combined. So it's big relative to other media spaces. It's quite big. And so it's central and has been a unifier for nearly a century. It was created by a conservative prime minister in, I think, the 30s. So it's been a big unifier and largely has been seen as a kind of bulwark against this creeping Americanization, yet it's also in many ways been captured by that same Americanization. At the same time, that local news has increasingly atrophied.

And some people like me make the argument that CBC ought to pivot, focus more and more on local news, for instance. So that's another frontier of battle. But it also ties back because now people search for CBC on Google as soon as that comes into effect. But yeah, that context is important because the news battle we're having here is once more a function of an Americanization of the country that's causing local consternation because Meta and Google are multinational American companies who are now shaping the way once more that Canadians get or don't get their news. And there's a real sense among many people that we're getting pushed around by outside forces who have no business telling us how to live and that that is actually what it's doing is undermining our

sovereignty if i know it's a shocker the listeners that a multinational may try to undermine a state sovereignty but here we are yeah absolutely um and you know these are concerns that many countries i think outside the united states have as well right When we look at the American tech companies kind of moving in and increasing their power around the world. And I think that this is something that we're going to come back to and talk a little bit more later. say have been some of the biggest concerns that people have levied about this approach that the government is taken by kind of framing this issue in the way that they have in approaching it in the way that they have so i think framing is the right way to put it because i have a feeling that if you ask most people they would be more or less fine with these tech giants paying a little bit more money to compensate the country, the media for the value that they extract. Because let's look at this from a kind of political economy angle. These companies come in and they extract a tremendous amount of value

from their workers and from the state through infrastructure and through other programs. They pay very little taxes, if not none. And then they extract value from their users as well, who are in effect part of their product. And they collect their data and they use that to build patents and they make more money and they further entrench and they further monopolize, oligopolize, and they keep their competitors out. and they do that on the cheap and so we come along and say well maybe you know you should give a little something back because you've taken an awful lot so that's the logic behind wanting a little bit more and by the way you've also destroyed journalism which is essential to democracy in the process and we think you should pay for putting it back together

and that's not to mention the broader concerns that exist around kind of meta and its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, and kind of like, you know, the disinformation and misinformation and stuff that circulates on those platforms that lead a lot of people to just believe really wacky things. I'll just give one example. Obviously, I think listeners will know that we have a carbon tax in Canada, but it's not equally applied across the country because some provinces were allowed to set up their own kind of unique systems that are not the federal carbon tax. And so where I live in Newfoundland, it's one of the Atlantic provinces on the east coast of the country. Our provinces recently took away their kind of local measures and accepted the federal carbon tax. And that just applied on July 1st on Canada Day. It came into effect. And there were a lot of people in this side of the country that thought gas prices were going to like go through the roof because this carbon tax is being applied when actually what happened was the provincial carbon tax of 11 cents came off of gas and the

federal carbon tax of 14 cents went on to gas. So it was an extra three cents a liter, which is still more, but it's not huge at the end of the day. But because of just how this was talked about and because of stuff that was going around on Facebook, like people thought that they were going to be paying a crazy amount more for gasoline. Anyway, that's probably a bit of a diversion from what you're talking about. But it's an interesting one. And I'm glad you mentioned because, you know, whenever someone bitches about this, I remember as a kid, my mom would drive around town looking for a gas that was two cents cheaper. I remember thinking to myself, I think this is inefficient. I sort of say to someone, how big do you think your gas tank is?

Now, if you're driving an F-150 or something like that, and you've got a 150-liter tank, whatever. But the whole point is to disincentivize that kind of thing, because it's killing us all So it's actually going to serve a lot of people, but you would never learn that from scrolling Facebook. So the government kind of says, okay, you're tearing the country apart. Why don't you give us a few bucks back to help us put it back together? And so fine. A couple of pushbacks against that is one, the mechanism, which is to more as a kind of fee for hosting or linking to media because the argument is well this is a service we're linking to you we're indexing your site on the the search engine so people can get to it it's like saying we're paving the road and we're now we're going to get charged because we paved a road for you to get where you want to go

that doesn't make any sense or someone posts posts a link on Facebook. They're helping because they're boosting you. Folks click on the link. They now look at your newspaper's ads and they get money from your ads. Or they hit a paywall and they say, well, I'm going to pay for this newspaper because I want this. And so it's a weird way to try to sell the tax or the fee or the levy or whatever you want to call it because it just doesn't seem to follow. And so the tech companies, now this is the controversial part, they call it a link tax. That didn't come from them. That came from civil society, the link tax framing. It was grabbed by industry as a kind of talking GR PR point. But I still find it kind of compelling,

despite the fact that I don't love these companies, because it does kind of talking GR PR point, but I still find it kind of compelling despite the fact that I don't love these companies because it does kind of feel like they're now paying a tax to link to media, which doesn't make a lot of sense. And so now they're pushing back against that idea. And of course, the broader issue is they don't want to have to pay this in every country in which they operate. Australia was the tip of the spear. Canada is the next little bit. California is looking at doing this right now. It had hit Congress in the United States. They're worried that it's going to kind of spread like a domino. This is a kind of Cold War domino theories come back for them. And so they say, we don't want to be charged to host links in all these countries where we operate because we have links in all of them. We simply don't want to do that.

So that's the framing. I think at the end of the day, the fundamental problem with it is a problem of framing it as a fee for hosting or boosting rather media links instead of money that they pay as a cost of doing business in a society from which they extract so much. Exactly. Instead of, as you're saying, the government has framed this as you have these links on your websites to news articles, and now you have to pay because those links are on your website. And so they're saying, okay, well, we're just going to take the links off. So we don't have to pay it now. Right. And instead you could have said, listen, you've like decimated the advertising revenues of these newspapers. You benefit from having them on your platforms.

In some cases, people see the headlines or see parts of the articles and don't go to the newspapers. So we're setting up a framework where you should have to give a bit back as a result of that. Right. But of course, again, the framing gets in the way. And I think that this is also somewhere where like the tech companies are pretty crafty with like how they come up with the ways to get people on their sides with the opposition to this so calling it a link

tax and saying it makes no sense to you know have to charge to link these things because this goes against the whole foundation of the internet or like with the streaming bill where the streaming companies saw their u.s multinationals like it's not going to be popular for them to come into canada and say, we don't want to show more Canadian content or contribute to making Canadian content. So instead, they're going to say, but these influencers that you do like, they might get hit by this. So we should just oppose the whole thing, right? So they're very crafty with how they frame these things. But I would say one of the things that I'm concerned about as well, and that I saw in

the Australian debate, and that I talked about then when this was going on back in 2020, was that I also don't like how you had these media companies. They are really struggling. They do need revenue in order to help to continue to fund journalism. And again, we can discuss whether they're actually going to do that or send that money to hedge funds or whatever. But if you make that kind of direct link to Google and Facebook and you say, okay, you're making this deal with Google and Facebook, you have now a new permanent revenue stream that's coming from Google and Facebook, that obviously creates incentives not to criticize those companies, not to want to jeopardize that revenue stream. Maybe you don't want to see them broken up or you don't want to see them broken up or you don't want

to see some regulations that are going to really impair their advertising divisions or what have you and i think that that sets up a really kind of nasty feedback loop or like set of incentives that you know i feel like is probably not thought about that the government hasn't thought through in setting up a framework like this yeah and what's what's interesting is these deals were happening too right so it's not like the government is saying we're going to start in six months from now after royal ascent once we've passed this bill and the king has stamped it it's still so silly yeah for people listening internationally we're a pretty silly country yeah we sometimes are like a kind of like playmobil country so you know in the next six months we're going to force you to start signing these deals and we're starting from scratch the

truth was these deals had been happening for some time already once the government passed the law the google actually and meta started canceling the deals that already existed. So not only has this bill not done what it was intended to do, it's actually undone some of the stuff that had been already happening. So it was a bit of an own goal on the government's part as well as a sort of vile bullying by the tech companies. I should say here, my frame for this is there are no heroes here at the end of the day. I don't really like anybody. It's like, it's hard to like the tech giants. It's hard to like the government's poor crafting of the bill. And it's hard to like some of these media giants who legacy folks are extracting value for shareholders. Cause at the end of the day, we're trying to

save journalism, but you know, they're trying to pay bonuses to their bosses and dividends to their shareholders. So I'm just like, okay, well, I don't like anybody here. Everyone's bad. It's like it's always sunny in Philadelphia. It's like you're meant to hate every character. They're all meant to be sociopathically so irredeemable that you just disgusted by all of them. Mission accomplished with this.

So now we're kind of left thinking like, okay, well now what happens? Well, cheering for nobody. It hasn't been a great couple of weeks for media in Canada. No, absolutely not. And I think what you say is so important, right? Like I wouldn't want to lead listeners to think that, you know, we're coming down on the side of the government or anything because you listen, the government in Canada is not that great. And this bill was not crafted in a way that makes a whole lot of sense. And they don't seem to have learned much from the Australian example. And the one thing I would say to add to what you were saying as to, you know, now that this bill has passed, and part of the reason that Google and Meta are threatening to pull news from their websites now, is that, as you say, they were already signing deals with media in Canada kind of ahead of this to show, look, we can actually do it. We're going to do it. You know,

we want to play nice, blah, blah, blah. But one of the things that came up when looking at the Australian example is that the process was not transparent. So in the Australian example, the government had set up a particular framework that the tech companies didn't like. So once again, Meta pulled news off of Facebook, and then the government kind of backed down and watered down the bill a bit so that they could sign the deals outside of the government framework. And as long as the deals were signed, the government wouldn't step in and do anything, right? That meant, though, that the deals that they did sign were not transparent at all, and you had no details as to how they actually worked or how much money was changing hands or anything like that.

And, you know, you just kind of had to try to sleuth into and figure out, like, what was actually going on. And so the government of Canada said, we don't want that process because we do want to actually know what's going on here. We do want it to be public and to be open to people. But that is specifically, as my understanding is, that Google and Meta are not cool with because they want to be able to sign their deals in secret and not have to go through kind of the

public process where these things are more transparent and out in the open. And that is really what they don't want. I mean, and that's such an important point because it's sort of like, I remember talking to someone about housing, which is another area in which this country is fundamentally busted. And, you know, there's a push for open bidding for purchasing a house. People are like, oh, no, no, it's great. It's going to drive prices down, except for it doesn't. It drives prices way up because everyone's like, I know exactly how much you bid. I'm going to bid you. So that's what happens in an auction. And this is what you've effectively created as an open auction. And that's effectively what's going to happen with this bill as well is an open auction. They're going to say, okay, well, you signed for this much money with the Toronto Star. We want the same or more because we have a higher circulation. Or, well, Toronto Star is meant to have the biggest circulation.

Comparable circulation. Now, Google and Meta can't play these companies off one another at the same time the bill also allows companies if they wish to deal with the tech companies multilaterally so they could band together and the multilateral element both domestically and internationally was something I think didn't get enough thought or consideration at any point in all of this. I don't understand why Canada wouldn't have from day one have been building a coalition of like-minded countries, Australia, New Zealand, perhaps the United Kingdom, and saying we're going to negotiate as a block because you can pick us off one by one. But if we band together, you probably can't. 30 million people, that's a market where you can say,

I'm pulling out and you're on your own. Once you start hitting 100 million, 150 million, now we're talking about a bigger market share and we're talking about a bigger blow to your goodwill bottom line on the balance sheet if you start attacking us all. That doesn't seem to have been seriously considered, maybe because Canada doesn't have the capacity, which is a different critique, or they were too inept to consider it, which is probably a mix of the two. So that was point one on the multilateral. Point two is, you know, the media companies could band together and do this too. They could say, well, we're all going to come to the table because one of the things i worry about with this bill furthermore is that the big companies can kind of go it alone and do okay but the smaller companies probably not

they're going to get bullied especially in a closed process so you need a transparency at the very least especially if you're not going to have multilateralism at the level of the media companies in this country, because otherwise the small players are going to get completely ruled. And so again, these companies, Meta and Google, are trying to protect their turf because they realize that this is going to spread both domestically costs them more and internationally and costs them more if they don't, which leads me to think that there's going to be a climb down from somebody and that it might end up being the government. Yeah. And that's certainly what we saw in Australia, right? But I think what you say about the multilateral piece of this and the small publishers is important because in Australia, what we also saw was that the small publishers didn't do as well out of this process, or it took them a little while to get included in it. And once they had to band together and actually try to get an agreement with these companies, I believe they got agreements with both in the end, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I haven't

double checked it. And then the other piece on the multilateral piece, I think that also shows like, if you're thinking about countries working on this together and coming together, like again, you know, why couldn't Canada work with California or these other things too, right? Where they are clearly looking at going in this direction. And then it makes it much more difficult for the tech companies to pull out in this way. But I think it also shows the kind of degree of power that these companies have where they can really kind of play states off one another or go above the state level or say like, yeah, you're Canada, you're 40 million people. Like we don't care if we cut off your market access or if we kind of piss off people in your country because

we have all these other markets that are making us a ton of money. And I think the other piece of it is that they've really benefited as well. Like I think the tech companies have benefited from a lot of the domestic conversation around this bill where all the problems with it and the fact that Google and Facebook are threatening to take the news stories off of their platforms is being framed in a lot of the coverage and a lot of the commentary as the government's fault and not kind of taking on the platforms, which I think is a real problem in my view. Yeah, it's real bootlicker stuff. I just just i don't understand the impulse to be a bootlicker and i i guess it's for some it's a syllogism government bad opponent of government good

facebook and meta and google are opponents of the government therefore they're good which is real dumb dumb dumb stuff. It's truly kind of kindergarten reasoning. And that's kind of where the conservative part of Canada is. They are, if it's a government thing, it's bad. And that's about the range of their thought from the front office these days. And yet there's a bigger, deeper, broader issue here that anyone who thinks about it for a couple of minutes ought to realize is important for them and for the future, which is power. And the Canadian media and commentariat in this country, the punditocracy, is really, really bad at thinking about and talking about

analyzing power. It almost never shows up in conversation. The same way that class almost never shows up in conversations because we just don't have that lens at the ready, even though it's just obviously applicable to pretty much everything. And it's definitely applicable here. Google and their shitty search, which is like 90-some percent of the market. That's a monopoly. Who have not only the tendency to extract extraordinary amounts of value from the state and from workers, but also the capacity to dictate terms for legislation and regulation and to shape what we see, how we see it, how we think. That's an extraordinary amount of power that even totalitarian states in their day didn't really have because the surveillance power wasn't quite the same. There is a kind of totalitarian surveillance capacity built into these companies. And I'm not saying they're the same thing as the Soviet Union.

I'm saying there's a big power of surveillance and that needs to be reckoned with because we farmed out a lot of our lives to these people and we ought to check that power because whenever power overpools in one place it tends to lead to domination i would think that individual citizens individual consumers and especially conservatives would be deeply worried about that concentration of power and monopolization of market because they're meant to be opposed that if you read them on their own philosophy and you don't assume they're massive hypocrites, which they obviously are. And of course the left should oppose it because the left ought to be all about non-dominance, especially by big market players. And yet people are kind of like, well, you know, I don't know the government

versus I got to pick one side. I'm a big fan of turning around saying, I don't like any of these people. And then pivoting back to, okay, well then how do we solve this problem so that consumers don't get dominated and the media infrastructure in this country doesn't fall apart so we can actually have a democracy, right? And I think it boils down to that question of how do we preserve democracy and sovereignty at the end of the day in a world in which there are these big tech players? And then we get into a conversation about results. We're still in this finger-pointing stage, and then eventually we'll tumble into the results stage. But by then, the government may well have climbed down because they don't like the bad press. And incidentally, they're facing the prospect of an election in the next 18 months or so, and a cabinet shuffle that may happen any day now, actually.

I think you've put it so well, right? Like, I am not super comfortable with like Canadian nationalism and like, what does that even mean? Right. But I think that when we're looking at a situation like this, as much as I disagree with the process that the government has pursued, and as much as I don't really like the government that we have in power, I think that they are like, you know, at least kind of going in the right direction where they're trying to take on these US multinational companies that have really kind of dominated what Canadians do online. Like I think you were talking about free trade earlier, right? And this kind of view and concern that Canada and Canadian industry or the Canadian economy was going to be

taken over by US companies. And I think one thing that we kind of like took our eye off of through the 90s and the 2000s, and I guess the 2010s as well, was how, you know, the internet expanded, and we all went online. and that was all wonderful and beautiful and great. But in the process of doing that, as the internet expanded into Canada and around the world, it brought US companies with it, right? And US companies dominate, whether it's Google or Facebook or Amazon or whatever, they dominate what we do online, whether it's shopping or watching stuff or searching for information, Even the notion that we would have a Canadian company that would be able to provide an alternative to that or be able to push back on it is just like unimaginable to

most people, right? And certainly that the government might be involved in trying to support something like that and pushing back against US companies. And so I think that's something that we kind of lost as the internet was expanding and as we were in this kind of era of globalization. And I feel like, you know, listen, the Trudeau liberals are not going to lead us to some like, you know, nationalist renaissance or anything like that. But I feel like, you know, one thing that we're getting with the debate around this bill and the streaming bill previously is like a larger conversation, hopefully, around what role should these US tech companies play in Canada? And to what degree

should they be able to set their own rules? And to what degree should they have to follow the rules that we set if they want to operate in our country? And that's why I feel like it's really important right now that, you know, with these tech companies threatening to take the news off of their platforms, as much as I don't like the kind of bargaining process that the government has set up, I feel like it can't step back at this point. Because then you're giving these major U.S. companies another win against us and showing that we can't stand up to them. Yeah, I genuinely don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot. If I had to hypothesize based on past data, my gut says the government might climb down. They might say, okay, fine, we're going to try to get a little closer to the Australian legislation. We'll cut you a break here or there. There's still several months before it comes into effect because I have a gut feeling that Pablo Rodriguez, who's the minister right now at Heritage, who had shepherded this bill forward, might be on his way out. If I had to bet, I would say he might be on the endangered list. But I have this feeling that

at the end of the day, Google and Meta know that this model has kind of stuck, that this is going to be a model that's picked up here and there and maybe eventually everywhere they operate, especially if California decides to pick it up. So they're fighting kind of a rearguard action right now against the expansive iteration of that model so that they can kind of limit how much it's going to cost them even though it's going to get picked up elsewhere because i do think it might if australia was the kind of initial test of the model i think canada is now the test of just how expansive that model is going to be before it starts spreading elsewhere and i have a feeling we're gonna fold because we are a people who fold on this stuff you know the trudeau government is i i just don't have the you know they've got enough you know they got enough guts to kind of do something but not so much guts that they're gonna do the big thing and then stick behind it that's my sense i could be wrong i would be happy to be proven wrong, but I kind of think I'm right. I agree with you. I don't think that the type

of people who to really kind of take this battle and continue with it, I would like to see that happen, right? I would like them to say, listen, you're operating in Canada. This is how it works here. You know, follow our rules or, you know, get lost. Right. And I think that that might not work well for them because unfortunately a lot of the Canadian media and the commentators have taken the side of the tech companies, which baffles my mind, but they have. So that might, you know, result in a lot of negative press, especially once the news articles are taken off and people are like, why can't I access this on Google and blah, blah, blah. I do think there's plenty of reason to believe that people would still find other ways to get their news and stuff.

But, you know, it would take a bit of adjustment, right? And the adjustment period would be a bit messy, I think. And I would just say as well, just to maybe add a bit of information that I don't think we've given out in this conversation yet. The estimate is that through this process, it might be about $300 million that Google and Meta would have to divert to Canadian media organizations to help fund their revenues and kind of what they do, right? Whereas according to the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, which is, I believe, at the University of Ottawa or Carleton, I'm not 100% sure which one, in 2021, Google and Facebook extracted almost $10 billion in ad revenue from Canada. So just to show you the real kind of difference there, we're asking for them to contribute

$300 million and they take $10 billion a year, at least from Canada. So I think it shows you the real difference there. I know it's absolutely ridiculous. And it's like, by the way, this is the same country that is going to pour tens of billion dollars into EV battery makers, into automakers who have profits of hundreds of billions of dollars already, right? Where we have no problem paying out big bucks to companies, and we're certainly not going to stand up to them.

And we've allowed ourselves, as have other states, to be played off against them. It's like the EV subsidy war, actually the broader green subsidy war, clean tech and so on, that's happening to the United States and Canada is happening because the two countries have decided we're not going to work together

to limit corporate extortion. We're going to go our own separate ways and allow these companies to play us off one another. And that's kind of what Google and Meta are counting on, that, well, we're going to go our own separate ways and allow these companies to play us off one another. And that's kind of what Google and Meta are counting on that, well, we're going to just let ourselves get played. We're not going to stand up to these companies who extract just extraordinary amounts of revenue. And that people are kind of going to say, yeah, well, I get that it's about democracy and journalism, but like, I want my shit and I want it right now. And I want to be able to click it and for it to be easy because I'm dealing with a lot of stuff. I don't want to turn around and say,

you know, I blame every single individual because people are just trying to get through the day. I don't begrudge somebody saying something like that because like, I can't get a doctor's appointment. I can't afford my rent or my mortgage. My job isn't keeping up with inflation. My groceries are through the roof and I can't feed myself. I can't put my kids through school. I'm worried about losing my job. I don't have a defined benefit pension because we don't do those anymore. Really? Like I'm inhaling smoke all day, every day because the forests are burning. I just want an easy fucking thing. I totally get that. So we're in a situation where we have to borrow a line from Cory Doctorow have in shitified so many aspects of our lives that we want some things just to be easy. And I totally get that. And I think Google and Meta know that too. And I don't think people are going to draw a kind of line in the sand and say, no, no, no, you can't cross. We're going to stand up for this country and we're not going to let you push us around.

I think I was going to say to the government, please, for the love of God, fix this because I can't handle any more shit. And I think the government will fall. And it's just kind of like the perfect example of late stage capitalism. I had to say, I like Cory Doctorow, but I hate how he's popularized that term. I wish he'd chosen like anything else in Jadification. But it just captures the process so well. I know, I know.

It really does. And Twitter is a great example, right? Because, you know, Twitter is one of these places where we're all kind of witnessing what happens when you let these companies do whatever they want. And I talked to Dr. O recently for an interview in Jacobin because he has a new book out that I quite liked called Red Team Blues, which is also just a great name for a book. And he was sort of running through Google and he was saying, and this is relevant to the context for this conversation, was like, Google really sucks. They don't build anything on their own. They buy up companies and they take their ideas or they put them out of business and they bury their ideas. Everything else they kind of take. They did it with their browser. They did it with Google Sheets and Google Docs. the rrs reader right and the one thing that they were supposed to have done like search like really really good at search has now become unusably bad because of seo and ads and like everything

you type something in now you get ads followed by links to reddit which has also been in shit of farce because corporations are screwing around with the api so it's just like people kind of turn around and say like what am i supposed to do everything is terrible everything's getting worse and now i can't get my news from tapping this thing into google because the government tried So it's just like people kind of turn around and say, what am I supposed to do? Everything is terrible. Everything's getting worse. And now I can't get my news from tapping this thing into Google because the government tried to get some more money to make it better, right? You see like the absurd spiral. I kind of just wish Camus were still alive to write about it because I would just love to see a novel like The Stranger, but about the existential pointlessness and dread of this technological moment you know wouldn't that be a great book i think that'd be a great book i'd like to read it yeah right i don't know i gotta think about someone could write that i don't know who

i think you've put it really well though right and and i think unfortunately with the expansion of all these technologies like a lot of it has been driven by convenience, right? And making things more convenient for us. And we've put aside and kind of ignored so many bad things because it's more convenient. So let's just accept that, right? I wonder what you think of kind of where all this is going to go next. Like, obviously we've talked about, we think that the government is probably going to fold, maybe not. But what do you likely see as coming after this? And do you think that there could have been or there still could be a better approach to this whole problem of journalism not getting enough funding and big tech companies having so much money and power in Canada? I've been thinking about the state of media and the future of media for a

very long time, and I've done some research and some work on this. And to be honest, I've never really landed on anything other than a kind of assessment of the variegated pros and cons for different approaches. I mean, you know, if you're getting your money from the private sector, you run into problems like the ones we're facing now. If you get it from the public sector you run into problems like the ones we're facing now if you get it from the public sector you run into the concern that you know if government is funding media does that influence or affect media independence so that's a bit of a concern too although i'm not as worked up about that as some people are yeah you know i think the cbc does just fine getting its public funding right i yeah i i do i think so and And I think at the end of the day, I don't really think it shapes the journalism on the ground all that much, if at all. So,

do we want to bolster the public broadcaster? Do we want to reimagine the public broadcaster as a kind of open license broadcaster? I don't actually know. I'm still torn and I'm just happy I'm not in charge of it. Because to give the liberals some credit, these are extraordinarily difficult files. They didn't send their best. One of the things that irritates me is if you kind of look at the folks who have headed some of these bills, they did not send their best. There are extraordinarily capable ministers in the Trudeau government. Not the ones we get on these files, unfortunately. I wonder what things would have looked like had there been a different minister there. So maybe they'll get a reset.

And I wonder if they'll kind of reset, bring in some better talent, try to reevaluate these bills. And I wonder if they'll also become a little more techno-skeptical because they had a bit of a love affair when they first came into power around 2015. It was the tail end of the Obama years and they were like, oh, everything's big data is the new oil and techno-ut to techno utopianism is going to solve all of our problems and they kind of rode that wave all the way up to sidewalk labs subsidiary of alphabet trying to pioneer a quote-unquote smart city on the waterfront in toronto and the government was like all behind it the trudeau government was all in the kathleen win government

that was a government the liberal government that governed ontario at the time they were all in the city of toronto all in and that fell apart too and everybody got pretty burned incidentally not because people were worried about data privacy and the privatization of public space but because alphabet wanted more land than they were willing to give them. You've had Joshua Cain on here. His book Sideways is a must read on this. I highly recommend it. But I wonder if that is going to engender a kind of techno skepticism where future governments say, we're not so sure we want to give you carte blanche to do whatever you want, or we're going to expect a little bit more from you. And I wonder if this fits into a broader conversation about making sure these companies pay, at the very least, some modest amount of tax to operate in jurisdictions. There is a broader movement right now for a global minimum corporate tax. Canada is part of that. But to push that even further so that companies are finally paying for what they extract is what it is it's a little bit like climate change these companies create an extraordinary amount of

externalities and they pay for almost none of it and they really need to be paying for their externalities because otherwise this doesn't work absolutely they should pay for it but we should also rein them in right so that there's yeah we should smash him up you know we used to have trust busting but the old trust busting model and the americans are better on this than we are because in canada the monopoly policy is to wave through monopolies as we've learned we have a competition bureau that does very little it does little to encourage competition it doesn't block mergers so i don't really know what they're doing. Well, nothing is what they're doing.

But back in the day, they would have said, okay, well, these companies are too big. They're too powerful. They control too much. We need to break them apart. And part of the problem is they say, well, no, no, no, no. That's designed for a market share that is kind of consumer item based. And it's like 19th century and it doesn't apply in the 20th century. It doesn't apply anymore because this is a different kind of consumer item based and it's like 19th century and it doesn't apply in 20th century doesn't apply anymore because this is a different kind of thing but my response is like bullshit it doesn't apply like if you can look at a company and say okay you've got 90 of a market share in

search you've got an x percent of a market share on advertising in a space you've got x number of patents that you are rolling out you're building cities and like at some point i just said like maybe we can design something that captures this phenomenon because it's really powerful because otherwise we're going to end up in a world in which the whole thing is run by a couple of company stores like it's the 17th century right or you're gonna end up with techno feudalism which is like not better so we we've got to take that trust busting model very very seriously but that's a whole different conversation talking about gutlessness i don't love our chances at this juncture totally no i

and i agree that is a whole other conversation as to like what competition policy should look like in canada and how that might differ from the United States model where we have a slightly different economy and like all that kind of stuff. And also just like, you know, how do we deal with the fact that we have these major US companies that are also global companies that dominate the market for so much of what we do now into the future and in the present, because everything is moving to tech and everything is moving online and has been for a couple decades and blah, blah, blah, right. But I think what you say is important right there has been this shift within the governing party within the liberal party as to their orientation on technology from this much more pro-tech stance to this place where now they still want to bring in the tech workers

they still want to bring in the tech investment and all that stuff and there's special immigration streams that are set up so if you have tech skills you can get into in the tech investment and all that stuff. And there's special immigration streams that are set up. So if you have tech skills, you can get into Canada more easily and all that sort of stuff. But they're also pushing back on some of these larger tech companies, even if it isn't like to the same degree that we would want or hope to see, you know, they're not coming with the kind of hammer that the European Union is using against some of these major American tech companies but at least they're starting to do some things and at least they're speaking out a bit more about these things and i think that that is positive no i think so too and i just really quickly it's worth

keeping in mind that there was a sort of early belief that the internet would be this by a handful of people this great libertarian space and these tech pros pretend to want a kind of techno libertarianism when what they actually want is to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do without government regulation because that's you know that's they're used to not being told that they can't do something and that the users will conform ultimately to that what they want to do is they don't want libertarianism they want libertarianism as freedom from the government but they certainly don't want responsibility to their users So they don't want libertarianism. They want libertarianism as freedom from the government, but they certainly don't want responsibility to their users. And they don't want their users to be free to do whatever they please, which is why they fight things like data privacy and so on and so forth. But now we're in a world in which we're starting to regulate

tech. The general data protection rule in the European Union was the first real cannonball that was fired i think and now i think these companies are realizing that the rest is coming down the pipe so these are kind of existential battles for them absolutely and you know they don't want anyone to regulate them but they certainly don't want the rinky-dink canadian government uh to be the one regulating them but you know i think that if we were thinking big like there's plenty of approaches that we could take not that i think the government would do it right but even like you know, I think that if we were thinking big, like there's plenty of approaches that we could take, not that I think the government would do it right. But even like, you know, we could think about nationalizing public telecom infrastructure and thinking about reforming the

CBC and giving it a lot more money so that, as you were saying earlier, it can do a lot more kind of local journalism and local reporting that we're in desperate need of and that the private companies can't provide. Or even just thinking about how we set up funding nonprofit and private media a little bit differently, instead of linking it directly to tech companies, maybe setting up a separate fund, maybe giving Canadians an option every year to choose how some of that money is being directed to the publications they would want it to go to. So you have less of the concern about, you know, the government choosing who gets money and all that kind of stuff. And maybe taxing like advertising profits of these tech companies instead of saying, hey, since you have links on your websites, you need to start

paying media or whatever, but do a specialty like super tax on ad profits or something. Anyway, just some random ideas. But I think that there's many different ways that we can approach it. And that would potentially have some other kind of fruitful conversations, especially as you're saying, because the media is in such a dire strait right now. Yeah, I really like the ad tax idea. I mean, it could be that a couple of years from now, we look back and this is sort of smoothed out and like it kind of did in Australia. And ultimately, it does work out more or

less the battle I think is going to be over how expansive the model is I really do think at the end of the day it's about the details of the model not the model itself because I actually think it's possible this is kind of caught on and it's going to keep rolling the real battle will come you think Canada's a big deal. I actually think California is going to end up being just a vicious fight. In part, it's their backyard, like the backyard of these companies. And as goes California, right? If they set the precedent within the United States and that becomes a norm and it emboldens Congress, I think there could really be something there. And maybe I'm being a little bit utopian or a little bit Panglossian, but I can almost imagine a bipartisan

consensus in the United States to do something like that because I can imagine getting Republicans riled up about the tech giants too in a way that maybe Canadian conservatives should be but aren't. So we could see this become a model and it work out, but that's not granted. And the way the Canadian government has fought for it has not been as effective as it might have been. And so you can, at the end of the day, kind of look around and say, well, we expected the government to do its job. It didn't really do its job well. And so we're going to criticize them for it, even as we look and say, well, that doesn't mean we're taking the side of the tech giants because we don't really like them either. Exactly. And I think what you've said is a great way to kind of end off this conversation because yeah, we're talking about something that's happening in Canada right now, but what happens in Canada also has bigger ramifications for how this model continues to expand. And in particular, you know, if it gets entrenched in California, where, as I understand, there is bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans to pursue this model, you know,

within that state, then it could not only expand through the United States, but then it makes it a lot easier for other countries to follow through as well. So David, it's been great to speak to you about this, to dig into this Canadian issue for our international listeners. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. David Moskrop is a freelance writer and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy. You can follow him on Twitter at David Moskrop.

You can follow me at PowerSmarks. And you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making it every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.