Political Hell #8: All Our Data Belongs to Them
The news business collapsed because it stopped being an information manager. What lessons should we have learned?
In Canada these days, there is a fight over news – sort of. There’s a stand-off, anyway. On one side is the federal government; on the other, Google and Meta. Between them is a piece of legislation called C-18, or the Online News Act. The legislation is designed to prompt the platforms to negotiate deals with news organisations to compensate them when their news content is posted and clicked on Google or Meta. It also requires both to pay media sites whenever links to stories are posted – what the platforms are calling a “link tax”.1
A lot has been written about this legislation – some of it is even worthwhile reading2, including this post from Steve Faguy that does a decent job of outlining the problems with C-18, including how it differs in key respects from the Australian law on which it’s essentially modelled. Now that the law has passed through parliament, it’s on to the CRTC to work out how the regulations will actually work, which means that while the legislation will stand, its specific application may not end up exactly as is assumed at this point in time. All the same, between now and the end of the year is a long time. And it looks as though Google and Facebook will hold firm to their decisions to eliminate links to Canadian news. Not an ideal situation by any measure.
The central question in all this seems to be: Who should pay for news? It’s a good question. But a small tweak to it might get us closer to addressing the real issue at hand – not simply that the news business is failing, but that many other businesses are struggling, too, as are a few of our keystone communal cultural and social institutions, like our political discourse. We could instead ask: What pays for news? The answer is, as always, data.