“Nobody… nobody trusts anybody now. And we’re all very tired. There’s nothing else I can do. Just wait.”
— The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, 1982
Toward the end of Part II, I mentioned Australia’s “News Media Bargaining Code” of 2021. I won’t recount for you here the complete history of that Act; suffice it to say that the right-wing Turnbull government wanted to allow Australia’s media ownership to become even more concentrated than it already was, and to secure cross-bench support for their plans to do so, they agreed to task the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) with launching an inquiry into “the impact of digital search engines, social media platforms and other digital content aggregation platforms (platform services) on the state of competition in media and advertising services markets, in particular in relation to the supply of news and journalistic content”. The ACCC then issued a preliminary report on 10 December 2018, followed by its final report on 26 July 2019.
That ACCC enquiry’s “Recommendation 7” was for certain “designated” digital platforms to be compelled to publish “a code of conduct to govern their relationships with news media businesses”. In particular, “where the digital platform obtains value, directly or indirectly, from content produced by news media businesses”, this mandated code of conduct would oblige the digital service to “fairly negotiate with news media businesses as to how that revenue should be shared, or how the news media businesses should be compensated”. In other words, a link tax.
I am normally averse to using that especially tired rhetorical attack (see also: “death tax”; “Netflix tax”), but in practical terms “link tax” accurately conveys what Recommendation 7 boiled down to. Under the policy, certain Australian news outlets would gain a right (though not an obligation) to seek financial compensation whenever the content they publish and host online is shared, or linked to, by the users of another digital platform… but only those platforms specifically “designated” by Australia’s federal government.
You can imagine the problems. But whatever else one might say about it, the ACCC’s proposal was not entirely novel. Consider the real-world examples of “link taxes” furnished to us by Spain in 2015 (catastrophic), or by Germany in 2013 (merely disastrous). Similar draft proposals had circulated within the European Commission since at least March of 2016. Of course, one perennial source of concern over those policies — a small matter — is their utter antitheticality with the principles of network neutrality that would, in theory, underpin a free and open Internet. And that isn’t just me saying that; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much invented the damned thing, would write in January 2021 to Australia’s Senate Standing Committee on Economics:
On the web, the sharing of content rests on the ability of users to do two things: to create content, typically text but also other media; and to make links in that content to other parts of the web. This is consistent with human discourse in general, in which there is a right, and often a duty, to make references. An academic paper is required to list references to other papers which are related. A journalist is normally required to refer to their sources. The discourse of bloggers involves links from one blog to another. The value of the blog is both in the text and in the carefully chosen links.
…Like many others, I support the right of publishers and content creators to be properly rewarded for their work. This is without doubt an issue that needs addressing, both in Australia and around the world. However, I firmly believe that constraints on the use of hypertext links are not the correct way to achieve this goal. It would undermine the fundamental principle of the ability to link freely on the web, and is inconsistent with how the web has been able to operate over the past three decades. If this precedent were followed elsewhere it could make the web unworkable around the world. I therefore respectfully urge the committee to remove this mechanism from the code.
Five weeks later, unbothered, the Australian Senate passed the “News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code” (or NMBC for short). The Act received royal assent on 2 March, and came into full legal force the very next day. By mid-April, the European Parliament had even adopted a similar policy, via Article 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (though the EU directive expressly exempts hyperlinks and “very short extracts”).
Well, what happened after that was… not much, if I’m honest. Having anticipated that the NMBC would likely pass, by February 2021 Google had already struck content licensing deals with several Australian news publishers, pre-empting further regulatory intervention. Facebook, for their part, threatened to (and even briefly did) block all content published by Australian news outlets from its services globally, as well as all news content whatsoever for Australian users of those services, but face-to-face negotiations between Facebook’s CEO and the Australian Treasurer saw the working bill amended, while the company (soon to rebrand itself as Meta) quietly set about inking content deals similar to Google’s.
The total value of all such deals is a closely guarded industry secret; however their net contribution to the Australian publishing industry is widely estimated at AUD$200 million per year, with Meta providing about AUD$70 million of that, and Google stumping up for the rest. Beyond these two Usonian tech giants, no other platform-to-publisher deals have been reported; no digital platform has been “designated” by the Australian government, and no designation actions are pending.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the Department of Canadian Heritage began reaching out to (in their words) “a variety of stakeholders within the Canadian news and information sector”. In the spring of 2021, the Heritage department sent a questionnaire to these stakeholders, which began:
As you may know, the Government has committed to ensure the revenue of online platforms is shared more fairly with Canadian creators and media (2020 Speech from the Throne and 2021 Mandate Letter). In accordance with this mandate, Canadian Heritage is currently exploring policy options for new legislation to support news publisher remuneration, specifically regarding how global digital platforms can appropriately contribute to a healthy Canadian news ecosystem.
The questionnaire then asked respondents to share their thoughts on two distinct policy options: one modeled directly after Australia’s NMBC, or one whereby “[online] platforms would be required to make financial contributions to news, as a percentage of their overall Canadian revenues to be paid to an independent fund”. Small wonder, then, that Google Canada announced that it had entered into similar content deals with eight Canadian news outlets in June 2021, including the Winnipeg Free Press (by October, Torstar had signed on too; Postmedia held out until July 2022).
In August 2021, then-Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbeault — remember him? — published a discussion paper based on feedback from this survey, and invited public comment. By April 2022, the returning Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez — remember him? — would introduce Bill C-18, better known today by its short title, the Online News Act.
Bill C-18 was largely modeled after Australia’s NMBC, with certain key changes. One of these was the inclusion of a formal exemption (or “opt-out”) mechanism, to be administered through the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The details are highly tedious, but they amount to a bureaucratised shake-down of “Big Tech” by Canada’s federal government, for the benefit of its legacy media publishers.
In lightning legislative time, Bill C-18 cleared both houses of Canada’s Parliament, and the Online News Act gained royal assent on 22 June 2023. From start to finish, the entire process had taken about thirty months. For context, the EU adopted its “GDPR” in April 2016; and ever since then, Canada has known that its own domestic consumer privacy laws will need to be revised and strengthened, or else it risks losing access to European service markets altogether. Yet despite abortive attempts by two back-to-back Liberal minority governments, no such revisions have been agreed, one full decade later.
Sure enough, after lengthy negotiations, in October 2024 the CRTC issued its first exemption order under the Online News Act to Google LLC, covering a five-year term (the maximum allowed under the Act). In exchange, the company agreed to contribute $100 million CAD per year, for five years (indexed to inflation), into a fund which would be administered by the “Canadian Journalism Collective“. This arrangement is recognisable as the second policy option envisioned in the Heritage Department’s 2021 questionnaire. Google actually chose the CJC as the fund’s steward over a competing proposal from the “Online News Media Collective”, a legacy-media consortium headed by News Media Canada, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And may I just say, the legacy news industry’s reaction to that perceived slight was both cool and normal.
Figure 8: Total funds disbursed to Canadian news publishers and broadcasters by the Canadian Journalism Collective in 2025.
But Meta Platforms — having learned from its experience in Australia, and being less vulnerable to Canada’s new “link tax” than the nation’s leading search engine — did not flinch. On 8 May 2023, company representatives informed the House of Commons that “if this flawed legislation is passed, we will have to end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada”. By the first of June, Meta announced that it would begin “randomised tests” of such a news-ban on its services, impacting Canadian users and news publishers. Three weeks later, on the same day the Online News Act gained royal assent, Meta “confirm[ed] that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada”.
Meta’s news ban went into effect in Canada on 1 August 2023. It’s been that way ever since. The government cried foul, of course — newly-appointed Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge (remember her?) called the move “irresponsible” and “reckless“, promising that her department would “stand its ground” in negotiations. As this was all unfolding during a particularly acute Canadian wildfire season, the minister even accused Meta of “putting people’s lives at risk”.
But the company had staked out its bargaining position, and would stick to it: that while links to news articles featured in fewer than three per cent of all posts in the content-feeds of Canadian users, those links generated some 1.9 billion outbound clicks annually for Canadian news sites. That referral traffic was a clear boon to those publishers, once these users arrived on their websites… but as content, their links could just as easily be replaced, if only to reaffirm that the proper and correct “price” to be levied on publishing a hyperlink or snippet sourced from a Canadian news outlet — or indeed, from any Web-based resource — is precisely zero.
Over the two-point-five years (and counting) since then, Meta’s thesis has been demonstrated to be largely true. The in-feed real estate once occupied by Canada’s newsrooms was quickly reclaimed by gossip, humour, rumour, and advertising. Platform engagement does not appear to have been suffered; Meta’s annual revenues from the U.S. and Canada, derived almost solely through web-based advertising, continue to trend ever-upwards.
Canada’s broader infosphere, meanwhile, has fared far worse in the divorce. Nine months into Meta’s news ban, Taylor Owen — the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy — rang the alarm bells loud and clear to Reuters‘ Byron Kaye (based in Sydney, Australia):
The news being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes… The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our feeds, the signals of reliability that were there, that’s gone.
But if any party has benefited from the passage of the Online News Act — or at least not been harmed by it — then it is surely the Winnipeg Free Press. Of the CAD$100 million remitted by Google in January 2025 (and dispensed by the CJC since March 2025), FP Newspapers will receive a little less than $1.4 million. It stands to claim a similar amount in 2026, and in each of the three years to follow. For a publisher that hasn’t yet cracked $4 million in “digital” revenues annually, that’s not too shabby!
As for the impacts of Meta’s news ban, referring back to the Free Press‘ own web analytics from 2021 — the most recent data we can access publicly — Facebook and Instagram only drove a combined 5–7 per cent of traffic to winnipegfreepress.com in that year, some three million pageviews in total. The situation would have been desperate if Google followed through on an earlier threat to remove Canadian news links from its search results, as these were the source of close to 40 per cent of the website’s traffic… but it didn’t, so it isn’t.
The Lessons Learned
Because we have and they have not,
Because they want what we have got
The enemy is poverty,
And the wall keeps out the enemy,
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall,
We build the wall to keep us free.— Anaïs Mitchell, “Why We Build the Wall”, Hadestown, 2010
When Martin Cash interviewed Bob Cox four years ago for his retirement tribute piece, the Winnipeg Free Press‘ soon-to-be ex-Publisher was asked for his thoughts on the newspaper’s future.
“I never worried about the future of the paper. I think it has a fantastic future,” said Cox. “My challenges were all in the present.”
In August 2023, a headline from the Niemen Journalism Lab would blare: “The poster child for micropayments for news is getting out of the micropayments business”. It was referring to Blendle, the Dutch media start-up with which the Free Press had drawn comparisons when its own unique paywall model first launched in 2015. Under new management, Blendle now cited the “very limited user base” for pay-per-article pricing, flatly stating that micropayments “have not proven to be a successful model” for news.
One month later, another headline, this time in Adweek: “How Canadian Publisher La Presse Is Growing Ad Revenue With Data Clean Rooms”. Having fully transitioned into a digital-only publication five years prior, the French-language news-daily now served an estimated 4.6 million unique visitors per month (according to Comscore), and reported a net profit of $11 million in its most recent fiscal year. Better yet, La Presse‘s hard-won in-house expertise in ad-tech had now positioned them on the bleeding edge of consumer marketing activations. A study in contrasts, to be certain.
On 29 February 2024 — perhaps emboldened by their Canadian experience — Meta announced that it would not renew any of the content deals it had struck with Australian news publishers in the wake of the NMBC, just three years prior. Google Australia claims to have “renewed over 50 News Showcase agreements with news publishers” in 2025, but the firm also ripped up some content deals, while converting others from multi-year commitments into annual ones. Predictions make for fools, but by all outward appearance, Big Tech would seem poised to sue for status quo ante bellum in Australia.
As for the Winnipeg Free Press, its strange beast of a paywall remains, but by early 2024 the paper had embraced a new reader acquisition strategy. Under the pretense of fighting online disinformation, the Free Press struck deals with all of the big local post-secondary schools — the University of Manitoba, Red River College Polytechnic, and the University of Winnipeg — to offer free digital subscriptions to all students, staff and faculty. To claim this great perk, all one must do is provide the Free Press with their email address, and also a university-issued email address, and then verify that they control both accounts, and then only ever read their newspaper while actively logged in to a web account that now marks them out as a persistently identifiable, high-value consumer. What a bargain!
This past summer, Christian Panson (the Free Press‘ long-reigning VP Digital and Technology) and Paul Deegan (President and CEO of News Media Canada since 2021) appeared at a public meeting in Winnipeg, organised by the newly-elected NDP government’s “All-Party Committee on Local Journalism”. Deegan urged the province to earmark “at least 25 per cent” of all governmental ad budgets, including those of all Crown corporations, for local news publishers (mirroring a similar policy announced one year prior by the populist Ford government in Ontario). In December, the “All-Party Committee” agreed; the only notable protest has come from the Opposition Progressive Conservatives, who had apparently wanted to commit even more.
Figure 9: Quarterly operating revenues (upper pair) and expenses (lower pair) of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership, Q1 2002–Present.
With that, we arrive — blinking and bewildered — in the present. Today, you and I occupy and navigate the very “future” that Bob Cox never planned for. And not to belabour the metaphor, but some readers may feel a pang of recognition at the thought of inheriting a burning pile of garbage that never even worked right in the first place. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that another “future” is coming, and that we might strive to make that future better than our present. So, where to from here?
Over the past decade of rolling debate over how (and why) the commercial Internet ought to be regulated in Canada, or how the Canadian public ought to be informed, we have heard plenty from the nation’s legacy media publishers and broadcasters, and from governments, and even from the supranatural corporate behemoths of “Big Tech”. Curious by their absence, however, have been Canada’s advertisers: that is, the people who pour all the money into this system, which these other parties then compete over. Might they have something to contribute? Heritage Canada did not think so when it sent out the 2021 questionnaire leading to the Online News Act, as it did not seek their input. Similarly, one imagines that no major advertising agencies were consulted over the $595 million “media bailout” folded into the 2019 federal budget. Indeed, why would they be?
I cannot claim to speak for an entire industry sector, but as someone who has made a career in web-based advertising, here are the thoughts I would share. First, the parties all seem to have the basics down: Canada should regulate these things, and local journalism does require public support in this moment. Both are vital to the good health of our shared civic spaces. In the same breath, we are right to fret over the myriad ways in which such public funds could be abused to constrain the editorial freedom of the press. Therefore regulators must ensure that the decisions made as to how those funds are allocated remain at arms-length, to be determined as apolitically as is practicable.
Bob Cox was right about one thing: when he appeared before the Heritage committee in 2016, he told them that the old model of publishing (and of advertising) was breaking down. In yesteryear, local and national businesses reached local and national audiences by advertising in local and national publications and broadcasts. These were, more-or-less, the only games in town, and federal regulation ensured that the beneficial owners of Canada’s media remained Canadian — so the money remained and recirculated within the national economy. But with the advent of the World Wide Web, globally-distributed digital platforms, predominantly controlled by foreign interests, now offer a far superior product to Canada’s advertisers, which produces a far stronger (and more readily quantified) return on investment. Please hear me when I tell you there is no credible “value for money” argument for governments buying yet more ad-space from traditional printed news-dailies, or over-the-air television stations. Not when the audiences for these media can often be reached with far greater efficiency through the open Web, and so-called “connected TV”.
But this is no capitalist’s utopia, and few can appreciate the truth of this better than advertisers themselves. The modern programmatic market for media is by no means purely efficient; by our own best estimates, something like 5–25 per cent of all digital ad-spend winds up going towards “invalid traffic” — that is to say, fraud — depending on which digital platform(s) are involved. As a consequence, each year Canada’s private sector (and to a lesser extent, its public sector) funnels millions of dollars into the hands of criminal and terrorist networks worldwide. We know this to be true, and yet we persist. The spice must flow.
Now, let us suppose for the moment that Canada were to begin treating advertisers as stakeholders in its media economy. Suppose that in regulating the commercial Internet, Canada placed an onus to subsidise its domestic news-gathering services not on a select few foreign Big Tech firms, but rather on those advertisers who target Canadian consumers through the Web, whose capital flight in recent years has largely fueled Big Tech’s growth? By what right should we protest if some small portion of our digital media budgets were set aside (after the point of sale) for the promotion of local journalism, to benefit those very same consumers that it was spent to reach?
Think of it like a “price on pollution“, only instead of one aimed at mitigating the harms done to our ecosphere through commercial and industrial activity, one aimed squarely at mitigating the noospheric impacts of commerce.
Ironically, Canada very nearly implemented this very policy, by mistake, through its Digital Services Tax Act of 2024. When tech giants Amazon and Google (among others) were faced a new 3 per cent tax on all Canadian ad revenues, the two firms simply added surcharges of 2–3 per cent to all of their Canadian ad inventory. Simples!
But then… ahh yes, back in June the Carney government promised to rescind Canada’s digital services tax, in an overt bid to appease the current Usonian President. With the benefit of hindsight, they might now find that Canada would be better served by breaking that promise, keeping the tax, and allocating one half of its first year’s proceeds towards the smelting of a single large gold brick, to be delivered to the U.S. capital at Mar-a-Lago.
And honestly, at this point, why not? As you now know, we have already tried many worse ideas.