With Parliament passing The Online News Act, Royal Assent is imminent. Next will be a regulatory process that establishes that the largest companies must enter into agreements to pay news companies their content generates revenue.
This is a significant step forward. It also advances the bar beyond Australia’s approach because it will involve an ongoing regulatory test to determine which firms are large enough to need to pay rather than having them designated by the responsible Cabinet minister.
Didn’t Spain or Portugal try this years ago and it backfired horribly?
Don’t have the background on those efforts but would be interested to see how this legislation compares.
Google has taken it seriously enough that it’s sampling removing links for a percentage of its customers.
Yeah, just looked it up. Was Spain.
And Google just outright left. Oh well, dont like those companies anyway.
And Spain’s population is larger than Canada’s. I hope our law was a bit better thought out.
Google does a lot of other business in Canada, and the economy is highly integrated with the US.
The risks will be different.
At the end of the day there is money to be made regardless of how much. They will pout and cry and stomp their feet and ultimately just continue doing business in Canada. This is nothing new.
On the other hand
Australia passed a similar law and seems like the companies ultimately complied.
Well that’s a bit relieving. I know Spain had a similar law but they ended up changing it later.
