The NWT government and city of Yellowknife are describing in tweets, Instagram messages etc. how to search key evacuation information on CPAC and CBC. The broadcast carriers have a duty to carry emergency information, but Meta and X are blocking links.
While internet access is reportedly limited in Yellowknife, residents are finding this a barrier to getting current and accurate information. Even links to CBC radio are blocked.
They could have put on their big boy pants and done like Alphabet and send someone to talk to the government to negotiate with them so the law wouldn’t affect them… But Zuck is Zuck and he preferred to “make an example of Canada” and people are defending them for some reason…
My understanding (getting this all entirely from Michael Geist, who’s been remarkably consistent advocating for an open internet for years now) is that the government’s ability to set regulations for this bill are quite limited.
Now that the bill is passed and could take effect at any time, and that there really isn’t much the government can offer in negotiations at this point, is that Meta is just moving on and putting all this behind them. From an implementation standpoint, Meta also needs time to make sure that their news blocking is done correctly as any bugs in that process after the law takes effect could be extremely costly.
Plus, the government and supporters of the bill are slowly being forced to realize that Meta wasn’t lying when they said that they could live without news content. Engaging in a negotiation process, especially one that won’t deliver what Meta wants, will only delay when the bill’s supporters eventually recognize that the assumptions underpinning this bill (that Meta is stealing value from news organizations) were false.
I’ll always be in support of the bill because I’ll always believe that if a company profits from the work/content/things created by the people of a country then they owe taxes to that country.
Even without it coming from news themselves, it would be easy for the Canadian government to force Meta to pay taxes in Canada on all profits made off Canadians or face getting banned from the country’s internet and to redirect those taxes to Canadian medias. And I guarantee you, they would rather make less profit from Canadians than no profit from Canadians.
But that’s the kind of regulations we’ll see coming from Europe before Canada I’m pretty sure.
For what it’s worth I believe Meta should pay taxes here too - but let’s tax them on their revenue and not on something arbitrary like how much traffic they send news organizations. That happens to be the view of Michael Geist as well - he’d rather that we just tax Meta & Google directly and then use the money to create a fund to support news organizations, instead of this roundabout way where we try to force them to pay some unknown amount of $ directly to the organizations.
