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.
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.
