Bill C-18 – the Online News Act officially takes effect
The federal government has announced rules and regulations for Bill C-18, The Online News Act.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge (who is also the MP for Brome-Missisquoi) joins CIDI to talk about next steps.
The Online News Act came into effect on Dec. 19, which requires large search engines and social media companies (specifically Google and Meta) to invest in Canada’s news sector through a new bargaining framework.
With newsrooms closing across the country, the goal of the Online News Act is for news organizations to be compensated for the content that tech companies benefit from, Minister St-Onge told CIDI.
She explained that the news content that is found on the search engines and social media platforms attract advertising revenue for these companies — revenues that “used to pay for journalists in newsrooms in the past” — and that Canada’s media organizations have “never been compensated for this news content.”