A Message To Canada (And The World) From Australia: Don’t Let Google Scare You

Jordan Guiao is Research Fellow at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology and author of Disconnect: Why we get pushed to extremes online and how to stop it. Shutterstock Google announced that it will remove news links for Canadian users after Canada’s Online News Act became law in June. The Online News Act forces Google and Meta to pay for the use of news content on their platforms. A similar confrontation occurred during the passage of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, on which Canada’s Act was modeled. Canada now has an opportunity to improve on Australia’s legislation, maintain a global standard, and hold fast, knowing that the Big Tech platforms will not be able to block all news from all the countries and states considering similar legislation. Australia’s Code is considered a success by the government, having resulted in more than 30 commercial agreements at approximately $200 million in value to news organizations. While the deals were all signed in confidence, it’s clear that they brought benefits to newsrooms, with the Guardian directly attributing new journalism jobs as a result of the Code. Although not everyone would call the Code a success (particularly publishers who missed out on deals), it did set a precedent for other governments to build on. Now the US, UK, India, South Africa and Brazil are also considering similar initiatives. No doubt other countries will follow. It also forced digital platforms like Google to acknowledge that the content they are harvesting from news outlets has…A Message To Canada (And The World) From Australia: Don’t Let Google Scare You