By entering into negotiations with Ottawa, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has tacitly conceded that it needs news content and that it is valuable for Meta. You might think that, having conceded this, Meta would do what normal companies do and pay for this vital input to its business. Instead, Meta appears to be actively lobbying the Government of Canada to gut the Online News Act so that it can reinstate news on its services without having to pay for it. Having Canadian news back on Meta would be good, but not at the cost of massively damaging Canadian journalism.
Rod Sims was chair of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission from 2011-2022. He is now an enterprise professor at the Melbourne Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.
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