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The public got there first. Carney got there later.

August 23, 2026

On Friday night Mark Carney said no to the “shit deal” that Canadian journalist Jen Gerson warned us might be coming.

In the absence of a lot more information than we’ve already been given, the post-mortem on the breakdown of negotiations will continue to be spun by whomever’s talking, be it Mark Carney or Donald Trump.

Canadian journalist Terry Glavin reminded us this weekend that “there’s also a good reason to be at least somewhat skeptical about the way Prime Minister Carney has explained the impasse, and by all means, be skeptical about the spin put about by sources close to the talks and various Liberal-friendly sock puppets. Peter Menzies, who has spent a lifetime in journalism and media policy, has noticed the ubiquity of “strategic leakers” informing reporters assigned to the trade talks. Menzies advises vigilance.”

Times two, I say (except for the sock puppet comment).

There might have been one such strategic leak last week about where the Online News Act stood in the midst of last week’s negotiations. The answer was: it’s awaiting a formal death announcement.

On Thursday, Toronto Star investigative reporter Justin Ling reported that “sources” (note the plural) were telling him that Carney had already thrown the Online News Act under the bus as part of a projected settlement and that “publishers” had been advised to be “ready for the death” of the bill.

Ling also reported “another source briefed by Canadian officials confirmed that the Online News Act would be a likely concession, but stressed that things could change before Friday’s new deadline.”

Note “likely.”

Unless someone in the source-chain is lying, “likely” and “briefed by Canadian officials” is intended to be reliable information.

I did ask Newsmedia Canada CEO Paul Deegan if indeed publishers were warned by “Canadian officials” about dropping the legislation that pays out $100 million annually to Canadian news outlets.

“I am not aware of any conversation, officially or otherwise, between publishers and government about the future of the Online News Act one way or the other, nor am I aware of any such conversations with any publisher or group of publishers,” he told me.

“Ministers and staff were extremely tight-lipped, which was entirely expected and appropriate, given the sensitivity of the final negotiations which were underway in Washington.”

On Friday morning the reaction in the Québec media to Ling’s tip off was of mushroom cloud dimensions. Among the Québécois opinion-movers pushing the red button were the respected University of Montréal law professor Pierre Trudel and Bloc MP Martin Champoux. The Bloc’s press release was punctuated by the words “appeasement” and “capitulation.”

If the Québec branch of the federal Liberal Party has one job it is, at the very least, not to severely aggravate nationalist sentiments on matters of media and culture. The toss-up federal by-election in Chicoutimi is next Monday, a separatist party leads the polls going into a provincial election at the beginning of October, and there will be three more federal by-elections in Québec later this fall.

No doubt all of this circulated back to the Prime Minister’s Office and was likely just one more thing to remind Carney that public opinion polling was making it clear he had misread the room of Canadian opinion on taking significant tariffs and making cultural concessions.

In the aftermath of the breakdown on Friday night, Ontario Premier Doug Ford went on television to make it clear that he’d been uncomfortable all of last week about the projected landing spot on auto, steel and aluminium tariffs. The landing spot was 15% for auto and 25% for steel and aluminum, effectively the global benchmark for Trump tariffs. Don’t bother with the nuances to those heart-stopping numbers.

On culture, Carney told reporters following his Saturday morning press conference that the sticking points included “the French language” and “culture.” He offered no specifics (although in one of his answers he referred to the American hostility to bilingual product labelling).

Whatever cultural concessions were in the works, the deal is off for now.

As trade lawyer Barry Appleton wrote this weekend, “the public got there first.” Carney got there later.

“Polling in the week of the negotiation put support for making concessions at thirty-nine per cent,” noted Appleton. “Six in ten Canadians were against conceding further before the deadline arrived. A government facing that number was discovering the edge of what it could sign more than it was choosing refusal.”

This disconnect with public opinion, and the popular appetite to stand up to Trump’s aggression, has been Carney’s weakness going back to his 2025 election. It’s responsible for both the surrender of the digital services tax and overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions to Canadian content.

I can offer from my own career experience as a trade union negotiator: ninety per cent of the job is to get the right read on your membership. It’s not only that you are accountable to the rank and file, as Carney is to Canadians, but more importantly their willingness to fight and take pain is your bargaining power. Overestimate or underestimate that fighting spirit at your peril.

Carney’s “I’m the adult in the room” persona is what got him elected. But it’s clear now he underestimated the Canadian people and was on the verge of presenting us with a bad deal as a fait accompli without giving us the opportunity to stand up to an American government brazenly determined to turn us into a vassal state, a Belarus to their Russia, when we’d rather be Ukraine.

I’m not convinced the Prime Minister has got the message yet.

He set September 8th as the date for imposing Canadian retaliatory tariffs. That gives him time to get past the three federal by elections next Monday. More importantly, the extra two weeks seem like an invitation to the Americans to reconsider and get back to the table with a better offer.

A fresh American offer with radically lower tariffs and no Canadian concessions seems unlikely. Let’s hope the Prime Minister is reading the right room, the Canadian room.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – The $600M waterhole – Australia’s new C-18 – Paramount merger drama continues

August 22, 2026

I was pleased with myself this week to be quoted in a news story that described the Carney government’s promise of $600 million annually for cultural spending, in replacement of the CRTC’s $200M levy on foreign streamers, as “the world’s biggest lollipop.”

So clever, but ultimately the wrong metaphor even though the soporific effect of a big wad of federal cash was meant to take the edge off of the angry reaction among Canadian producers, broadcasters and the public at large after Carney overruled the CRTC.

No, the right metaphor is “the $600 million watering hole.”

I say that only because the Prime Minister and cabinet minister Marc Miller have been so coy about where the money is headed. After all, $600M is three times the overruled $200M. It’s not just a Netflix bailout.

But we’re still in the dark about the destination of those federal dollars. Members of the minister’s newly appointed advisory committee on audiovisual production have been sworn to secrecy, according to the Wire Report’s story about signing NDAs. The Wire Report story quotes one member of the committee as saying we will not see the product of their deliberations “for a few months.”

I would expect that the producers (CMPA), the broadcasters (CAB), and news publishers (Newsmedia Canada) are engaged in an all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort to influence where that $600M gets spent. If the government is telling them anything useful, no one is talking.

Ergo, let’s give uninformed speculation a try. Some of the additional $400M might be new spending. Some of it might relabel existing federal cultural dollars.

Government Priority 1?: Media Funds

Presumably the first $200M of the $600M is to do what minister Miller promised: replace the CRTC’s 5% cash levy on audiovisual (Netflix et al) and audio (Spotify et al) streamers.

The $200M figure came from the CRTC’s 2024 estimate and is now two years out of date. Of the total, the CRTC earmarked $140M for additional CanCon contributions to the Canada Media Fund for entertainment and children’s programming, the Independent Local TV News fund, the Indigenous Screen Office and a variety of smaller production funds that finance shows by and for diverse communities and official minority language communities.

Another $60M of music streamer cash was intended for artist development funds (Factor, MusicAction, Starmaker, and RadioStar). It was also to support Community Radio Fund and the newly established Indigenous Music Office.

There was also money for news reporting in small and mid-sized radio markets.

The audio streamers weren’t part of Carney’s June 3rd quash of the CRTC ruling on video streamers, but a subsequent communication by the federal Attorney-General to the judges hearing Spotify’s appeal to the Federal Court means that $60 million is gone too.

Based on the minister’s public statements, expect these media funds to be the first to drink from the $600M watering hole.

Priority 2?: Reversal of the fake cuts

The next speculative tranche of the $600M is a relabelling exercise: the restoration of 2026 federal budget cuts to cultural funding.

That would reverse the $192M cut to the CBC, the $68M cut to the Canada Media Fund, $13M cut from the Canadian Periodical Fund for magazines and community news publishers, and $2M from French-language TV5 News. Perhaps the Liberals will pick the moment to restore their cuts to the Canada Book Fund ($3.4M) and the Canada Music Fund ($16M). Final tally: nearly $300M.

Ever since the minister tabled these cuts in the “Main Estimates” federal budget back in February, the word on the street was that the CBC and Canada Media Fund cuts would be restored or mitigated in a Supplementary estimate.

Priority 3?: Double counting of budget dollars already announced for broadcaster access to the QCJO journalism labour tax credit

In March 2026 the Liberals announced (by my estimate) a $115M expansion of the QCJO journalism labour tax credit to television and radio broadcasters. The public pressure for policy action hasn’t let up: since then, Rogers and Global News announced layoffs in television and radio as well as closures of several AM radio station. Quebecor has threatened a fresh round of layoffs “if nothing changes.”

If Carney counts this as a piece of the $600M, this is also a relabelling of previously committed federal dollars.

Priority 4?: Replace the CRTC’s recent 1.55% cash levy on streamers and Canadian broadcasters, quashed by Carney’s announcement

The 1.55% would have relieved Canadian cable companies from the obligation to subsidize public service television channels mandated for basic cable TV by the CRTC (e.g. APTN, TV5, CPAC).

When the CRTC announced this cash levy in May I estimated the cost at $42M for foreign streamers and $93M for Canadian broadcasters.

If taken out of the $600M, that’s another $135M draw from the waterhole.

Priority 5?: More money to replace the lower than expected streamer investments in CanCon productions

The CRTC ruling that Carney overruled would have compelled foreign streamers to invest directly in Canadian shows at 8.5% of revenues (the cash levies of 5% and 1.55% made up the remainder of the overall 15%).

We won’t know until minister Miller unveils his new policy direction to the CRTC, but these “Canadian Programming Expenditure” investments could be metered at the same 8.5%, or more or even less. I say with a straight face: it all depends on what Carney promised Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos in that New York hotel room meeting in late May.

If Carney agreed to reduce that 8.5%, I figure it will cost about $28M in federal money to replace each percentage point of the 8.5%.

Priority 6?: the Online News Act

I hate saying this out loud, but others have as a matter of wish fulfillment. Between American trade bullying and Carney’s propensity to cave on cultural legislation, is the Online News Act on the chopping block?

If it doesn’t get thrown under the bus in trade negotiations, should we expect another hotel room meeting where the Prime Minister promises to sunset Google’s $100M news licensing payments to Canadian news organizations which are up for renewal in 2029? (A note here: Apple got an in-person meeting with the Prime Minister on June 11th to talk about the Safe Social Media Act, recorded in the lobby registry).

And if so, is Carney planning to replace Google’s $100M out of the $600M?

Priority 7?: Anything

There is the chance that the $600M includes money for some good public policy, independent of the expediency of the moment.

Not that I am stumping for it, but it would not surprise me at all if the Liberals committed more money to the export of Canadian shows through Telefilm, or special funding for international co-productions with France or other trading partners. It would rhyme with their overall approach to big investments with, um, non-hegemonic trading nations.

If you’ve done the math, that’s a $850M draw down from a $600M waterhole.

If Canadian producers, artists and broadcasters have also done the math, that would explain the flurry of lobbying activity since Miller announced the $600M.

***

While we Canadians speculate on the future of the Online News Act, this week the Albanese government in Australia legislated version 2.0 of its 2021 news licensing scheme, rechristened as the News Bargaining Incentive.

The NBI expands the scope of its 2021 legislation to add TikTok and Microsoft’s LinkedIn to the previous law that required Google and Meta to make licensing deals with most Australian news outlets. Meta refused to renew its deals that expired in 2024. The NBI is the government’s response.

The new legislation sets a price on compliance: the four tech companies must pay 2.5% of their Australian advertising revenues into a news fund.

However, each of the digital platforms can substantially reduce their cost by making licensing agreements directly with at least eight news organizations. The tech platforms get 150% credit toward their 2.5% target by making deals with large news organizations, and 200% credit for agreements made with small and medium sized news outlets.

If there’s any shortfall on meeting the 2.5% target, the government will levy the remainder in cash from the platforms with proceeds banked in a national news fund. That pool of money will be presumptively distributed to news organizations based on a journalist headcount, as in Canada. Unlike Canada, the Australian news fund can tweak the headcount formula to be more generous to smaller news outlets.

I have not seen estimates of news licensing payments the NBI will generate, but the 2.5% figure looks substantially less than the value of the 2021 deals which totalled $190M annually. And if deals get made to offset the 2.5%, it would be worth something closer to 1.5% of ad revenues.

There’s no word yet on when the NBI legislation will be proclaimed by the Albanese government. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is opposed to the NBI and a spokesperson told the Australian Financial Review back in April that the White House regarded the NBI, which it did not differentiate from a digital services tax, as “foreign extortion.”

***

The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger drama refuses to take a week off.

As you recall, twelve US state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta are contesting the $111B merger under the federal antitrust Clayton Act. A trial date is set for March 2027.

After threatening to move all of its studios out of Los Angeles, Paramount owner David Ellison’s new tactic is to ask the federal judge who granted an interim injunction against the merger to impose a $1.9 billion surety bond on the states. The purpose of the bond is to cover the $210 million per month “ticking fee” that Ellison will begin paying on October 1st to Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders who voted “yes” to the merger.

The judge previously declined to require the bond finding that the states’ lawsuit raises important matters of public policy. As for Bonta, he says Ellison made a grown up’s decision to agree to the ticking fees in the first place.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass appears to have been swayed by Ellison’s threat of a capital strike and is urging Bonta to make a deal now instead of pursuing the lawsuit. Her challenger in the upcoming municipal election supports going to trial instead.

The Trump administration looms large on the sideline. The White House is close to David Ellison’s father, the world’s second-richest man Larry, who is bankrolling the merger. Ellison Pater’s wealth comes from his Oracle Corporation. Oracle is carrying a lot of debt and is badly exposed in the event of financial instability in the AI industry.

Whether Bonta and the other attorneys-general want a court-ordered restructuring of the merger or just more financial commitments, delay is clearly their leverage.

One gets the feeling that with so much money and so many jobs at stake, a deal will get made long before trial. Late yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom expressed interest in an early deal and the Democratic nominee to replace the termed-out governor is also a proponent of settlement.

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Digital “alignment” and the Canadian Safe Social Media Act

August 19, 2026

It is commonplace to observe that it pleases the Trump administration to throw its weight around when it comes to Big Tech’s global dominance.

The propensity to claim extraterritorial sovereignty through trade negotiations on digital trade, which has its own chapter in the CUSMA agreement between Canada and the US, is coming to a head.

That was apparent yesterday when the President announced a three day pause on his threatened tariff increases on Canadian goods and services because a tentative deal might be taking shape. His trade negotiator, USTR Jamieson Greer, tweeted enigmatically that one of the checked off bargaining items is “digital trade alignment.”

As Canadian trade commentator Barry Appleton writes, the details behind Greer’s statement are a warning that we may soon discover that the Prime Minister’s “AI for All” national strategy for AI adoption and digital sovereignty is in for a heavy edit if it depends on US “alignment.”

One of the immediate applications of “alignment” with whatever it is that pleases the President and his tech bros is Carney’s Safe Social Media Act, Bill C-34. It was tabled in the House on June 10th, just prior to the summer recess. It is the government’s plan to regulate online harms in AI chatbots, social media apps, and porn sites. The core of the bill is the requirement of digital safety plans that meet Canadian federal standards.

This is the bill that culture and identity minister Marc Miller described as non-negotiable in trade talks, “hard stop.”

You may recall that Miller’s cabinet predecessor, former Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, said the same thing about the Online Streaming Act.

While the US has no domestic equivalent of the Online Streaming Act that the Trump administration loathes, US Congress is in fact edging towards its own version of the Safe Social Media Act.

As I noted in an earlier post, the US Senate and the House of Representatives have both passed potential legislation but are quarrelling over how tough the bill should be in imposing a “duty of care” on digital platforms which would feature digital safety plans that meet US federal standards.

The Senate and the House have been in this stalemate for nearly two years but whatever legislation eventually emerges will be what the Trump administration seeks in “alignment” from Canada, the EU, and everyone else.

Goosing Congress along is this week’s opening of the social media trial of the decade pitting 29 US states against Meta. The state Attorney Generals are flamboyantly claiming $1.4 trillion in damages for what whistleblowers describe as Meta knowingly imperilling the mental health of youth. Earlier trials in New Mexico and California went against Meta. Meta’s current market cap is about $1.4 trillion.

It’s possible that one of the non-aligned views of regulating online harms will be a ban on youth accounts altogether. Australia has imposed one (for under-16), the United Kingdom is considering one, and ten US states have done so. Meta itself has a corporate policy banning under-13 accounts. The Trump administration’s official position is opposed to age bans.

Recently in Europe, the French constitutional court struck down the Republic’s under-15 ban as “a disproportionate restriction” on freedom of expression of young people .

The French court ruling suggests we should expect a similar lawsuit in Canada should C-34 become law. The Carney government’s bill proposes to use age bans as an interim measure, the better to spur the AI and social media companies to come up with effective online safety plans, like special youth accounts with design and content access features.

Just my two cents worth, but considering the wisdom and widespread popular support for legislative action to protect kids online, I find it hard to believe a Canadian court wouldn’t back up the Carney strategy of giving Big Tech a choice between developing safer online products or else comply with an age ban to protect vulnerable youth from unsafe content as a constitutionally permissible limit on children’s right to free expression (which includes the right to consume it, like the right to read).

Of course it may not matter what the Canadian online safety act ends up saying, or whether it’s constitutional, if we’ve already bargained away digital “alignment.”

Hard stop.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Film industry throws down on Carney – ambitions for Canadian media tech – Paramount’s runaway shop

August 15, 2026

Canadians, it seems, are not looking for a national moment of humiliation in the face of US trade aggression. Public polling tell us so and hats off to The Line’s Jen Gerson for spelling it out.

“Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.”

Visceral, yes. True, also yes.

The film and television production community thinks so too and said so this week, more politely, in an Open Letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal government.

The Open Letter published by the Canada Media Producers Association, and signed by 50 industry organizations, restates the industry’s dismay at the federal government’s decision to overrule the CRTC’s cash and investment obligations for US streamers.

The government’s current position is that later this year it will formally instruct the CRTC to strike down media fund cash levies on Hollywood streamers while the federal cabinet dictates a new figure for the direct streamer investments in Canadian programming that will be required. The government says it will dip into federal coffers to make up the difference.

“The government’s $600 million per year pledge, though appreciated and welcome, is not a substitute for durable, legally enforceable contribution obligations,” CMPA President Reynolds Mastin is quoted in the press release. “Discretionary funding is subject to budget and external political pressures; a regulated contribution framework is not.”

The CMPA and the broad spectrum of industry signatories to the Open Letter appear to be a content to stick with the CRTC’s overall 15%-of-revenues benchmark for streamer investments in Canadian content, even if it is missing the cash contributions to Canadian media funds that recycle the money into Canadian-produced programming that becomes available to the streamers through licensing agreements.

The signatories to the Open Letter also appear comfortable with the CRTC’s new investment obligations for Canadian broadcasters, reduced from 30% to 25% of revenues in May. No broadcasters signed the letter.

Notable absentees from the otherwise exhaustive list of signatories include the Los Angeles-headquartered film crew union IATSE Canada and the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF chair Cameron Bailey was recently appointed by the federal government to represent the media industry on the federal government’s advisory committee on US-Canada trade talks.

***

Flying below the radar, the Canada Media Fund just announced that it has signed an Expression of Interest agreement with the Los Angeles-based Interlink Investment Group. A consortium of Canadian cultural groups signed on to the EOI, including the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, Racial Equity Screen Office, and Muslims in Media.

The CMF exists to allocate production funding, contributed by the federal government and Canadian cable companies, to independent Canadian producers creating and licensing Canadian content for television and streaming broadcast.

The project that CMF CEO Valerie Creighton has in mind is to create a public-private investment fund to support “a new model for international collaboration in the media and technology sectors that would complement Canada’s screen-sector ecosystem, creating new pathways for investment, co-production, technology development, content creation, and international distribution across a range of sectors, including film, television, digital media, gaming, creator economy ventures, artificial intelligence, virtual production, and emerging content technologies.”

Apparently, funding for a Canadian media tech stack.

The text of the EOI agreement has not been made public.

There are a million questions that arise out of the Fund’s surprise announcement. The first is whether this is a freewheeling Creighton floating a trial balloon or, on the other hand, a subtle move by an unseen hand on the federal government’s chessboard of media policy.

Heritage Canada has yet to comment on the proposal and no money has been committed by either public or private investors.

The semi-autonomous CMF is majority-funded by the federal government, seats two government appointees on its board, and reports on its programming activity through the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The Canadian-educated Interlink chairman, Shezad Rokerya, is a member of the World Economic Forum and chairman of the Canada–UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund Council. The Council appears to be an investment platform with personal endorsements from Canadian diplomats but not a formal status within government.

The policy idea of a Canadian owned media technology stack suggested by the CMF press release is consistent with at least two ideas much in general discussion of late: exports of Canadian audiovisual content and Canadian sovereign control over the distribution network for that content.

***

Is Paramount chair David Ellison planning a runaway shop to punish California for challenging its merger with Warner Brothers Discovery ?

After a federal judge sided with 12 plaintiff state governments to delay a trial date for their anti-trust lawsuit until March 2027, Ellison has threatened to move his entire studio operation out of Hollywood to another state if California does not negotiate an out of court settlement with him now.

Paramount begins paying $7 million per day to Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders on October 1st while the merger remains unconfirmed.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Will Carney’s Netflix tax play in Chicoutimi? – is the Liberal kids safety bill safe from Trump? – Paramount Warner Bros trial date

(satiric AI photo illustration)

August 9, 2026

It’s likely that the standout moments of the Mark Carney chapter in Canadian history books will include the Gordie Howe Bridge and his repeal of the digital services tax.

I’m not 100% sure how the Prime Minister will be remembered in English speaking Canada for his duck-and-cover on the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11. But I’m a lot more certain how he will be remembered in Québec.

At the end of July, days after Carney announced three federal by-elections that include the swing-riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, local Bloc Québécois candidate Caroline Dubé held a press conference to denounce Carney’s plan to eliminate the CRTC’s imposition of Canadian content contributions by Netflix and other US streaming giants.

Along with sitting Bloc MPs Mario Simard and Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Dubé teed off on Carney for ten minutes. The lead talking point was that Carney was letting global streamers off the hook for $200 million annually and turning to taxpayers to fill the funding gap: Canada’s first “Netflix tax.”

Another Bloc talking point was more visceral: the Bloc MPs were grinding their teeth over a Liberal double cross on a bill that the Justin Trudeau cabinet had managed to steer through the “psychodrama” of a minority Parliament in 2022 thanks to the Bloc. The Québec nationalist party’s lead on the file, MP Martin Champoux, had successfully negotiated several Bloc-sponsored amendments to the bill with Liberal MPs but Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister appears to be taking steps to gut it in appeasement of Donald Trump’s trade aggression.

Last week Le Devoir published an opinion editorial co-written by leading Québec legal scholar Pierre Trudel (also one of the authors of the 2020 federal report that set the table for Bill C-11) hitting the same talking point on the risk of replacing regulatory contributions by streamers with federal budget dollars.

“Canadian cultural industries are condemned to a chronic dependence on public funds,” wrote Trudel and Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens in French. “That means creative activities are at the mercy of budgetary mood swings. At the same time, foreign companies that derive juicy income from the cultural consumption of Canadians get a pass….

“[Policies in implementation of Bill C-11] are at the heart of what allows Canada to be considered a different country from the United States.”

The op ed was endorsed by the signatures of an impressive list of Québec scholars. Open letters don’t always constitute a news worthy event, but this one will discomfit the Québec branch of the federal Liberal Party which, between the surrender of the digital services tax in June 2025 and this climb down on the Online Streaming Act, has lost the room in Québec on the cultural file.

The Chicoutimi by-election is August 31 and there are more to follow: two Montreal federal by-elections that the Prime Minister must call to fill the departures of Steven Guilbeault and the NDP’s Alexander Boulerice as well as the provincial election on October 5th.

***

If the Carney government continues down this path of gelding its own cultural legislation it may soon have to consider the fate of its online safety bill, The Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34, tabled in the House of Commons on June 10th.

At the time, the culture and identity minister Marc Miller publicly stated that C-34 would be shielded by the Liberals from US trade pressure because it involved the protection of children. “Kids just aren’t on the bargaining table, hard stop,” he added.

The Safe Social Media Act would regulate harmful content available from AI chatbots, social media, and porn sites. While there are specific safety features required by the bill, the centrepiece is a newly created legal “duty of care” requiring digital platforms to create safety plans, subject to approval of a new federal regulator, that minimize harmful content and feature safer digital design.

On the theory that Carney government has no appetite to stray further from what the Trump administration will tolerate in the regulation of US-headquartered digital platforms, it is worth noting that two years of stalemate in US Congress over online safety might be coming to a head.

Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn’s “KOSA” (Kids Online Safety Act) has passed the Senate a second time and was referred to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

House Republicans, however, still do not like KOSA’s “duty of care” strategy because they fear digital platforms will comply by “censoring” conservative-friendly content. As White House executive order on AI phrases it: “Congress should prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas.”

The House watered down the KOSA duty of care in the first version of the Senate bill. However it appears that Blackburn and a bipartisan Senate have drawn a line in the sand on the their version.

The White House has yet to pick a side, perhaps reluctant to make unpopular policy choices between protecting children and conservative speech on gay and transgender kids in the run-up to November’s mid-term elections.

Politico reported another wild card on this file; where Meta stands in all of this.

Meta lobbied against the earlier Senate version of KOSA two years ago because it didn’t support the Meta position that age gating or parental consent check-offs for minors accessing social media should be imposed on the Apple and Google app stores, not on Meta and other digital apps and platforms.

Meta is advancing the same position on age-gating in Canada, having pitched its case to the public on CBC. Meta has also been lobbying the Carney government on this issue.

It’s reasonable speculation that Meta might be prepared to both reinstate Canadian news on its platforms and pay publishers for it if it got something in return on the Safe Social Media Act.

***

A quick update on the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger that MediaPolicy has been tracking.

A federal court judge sided with the plaintiff state governments, who oppose the merger on anti-trust grounds, who asked for more time to prepare their case. A twelve-day trial will begin March 27, 2027.

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Letter from a Canadian: On the meaning of trade ‘discrimination’

August 7, 2026

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!‘”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

***

It’s a post-modern cliché, but there is something to the idea that to name a thing is an expression of power.

Last November, 15 Republicans and 12 Democrats sitting on the House Ways and Means committee wrote to Canada’s trade minister Dominic Leblanc. They thanked Canada for rescinding its digital services tax. Then they called for the repeal of our Online Streaming Act (the “OSA”) because it’s “discrimination.”

Today, news reports in the Canadian press habitually list the OSA as laying square in the US trade cross-hairs.

Now that stop-and-start trade talks are heating up again it’s a good time to separate fact and fiction on the OSA.

Despite our long border and our differing origin stories, Canada and the United States have many things in common. We are democracies and we are neighbours. And we are global traders.

What we also have in common, although it seems to be slipping lately, is that in matters of cross border trade in goods and services, we respect each other’s sovereign decision-making provided they respect principles of fair treatment.

Of US companies operating on Canadian soil, or vice versa.

We wrote it all up in a trade treaty ratified by Canadian Parliament and the US Congress, the 2018 CUSMA deal (“USMCA” to Americans) and the two earlier versions signed in 1988 and 1992.

November’s congressional letter invited Canada to rescind the OSA because, according to its signatories, the OSA is “discriminatory” against US streamers and in violation of USCMA.

The TL:DR version of this post is to say the OSA is neither of those things.

…Continue reading at Cartt.ca

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On Canada-US Friendship Day

August 1, 2026

On July 28th the Toronto Blue Jays suited up for nine innings against the Washington Nationals on “Canada-US Friendship Day.” The game was played in the US capital, home to the Nationals, the onetime franchise of the Montreal Expos. The friendship day was sponsored by the Canadian embassy in Washington, partnering with the Nationals’ organization.

The Jays won 6-3 and “Canada” came before “US” on the centre field jumbotron. How sweet it is.

Only as you can see above, the event was also sponsored by Google, Amazon, and Netflix, three of the Big Tech and Hollywood companies that have mobilized US Congress to demand the gelding of Canada’s Online Streaming Act. A spokesperson for the Canadian embassy told MediaPolicy that the Nationals arranged the corporate sponsorships.

Our cross border friendship was celebrated the same week that the Wire Report broke a story about the federal Attorney General’s court filing on behalf of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. The AG advised the Federal Court of Appeal that it was rolling back every cent of the CRTC’s five percent cash levy on Netflix, Google, Amazon and the rest of the foreign streamers and replacing it with federal cash.

That’s old news of course, but the court had asked for clarification with an eye to dismissing the streamers’ appeal to strike down the CRTC levies on the grounds that the outcome no longer mattered. The court hearing was thirteen months ago in June 2025 and the final decision on a matter of pressing national importance remains outstanding. It sounds like the judges are looking for a back door to the courthouse.

Even though it was old news, the revelation that the government would instruct the CRTC that its streamer cash levy must be set at zero caused a stir because Culture and Identity minister Marc Miller had explicitly told reporters on June 14th that the cash levy would be lower but not zero, chastising the Opposition Bloc Québécois for suggesting otherwise. That sounded plausible because even Netflix had agreed to a two per cent levy back in 2023.

But now confusion reigned. A brief statement given by the minister’s office to the Globe and Mail misdescribed the levies. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters publicly expressed surprise at “zero” because it had been quietly advised otherwise in the past few weeks.

The Carney government keeps assuring the public that in due course it will publish its official policy direction to the CRTC on what it wants to see in place of the 15% streamer contribution to Canadian content (currently set at 6.5% cash contributions to Canadian media funds and another 8.5% in licensing or commissioning Canadian content for its own services).

Carney also told reporters that the government would meet with the CRTC commissioners “in the coming weeks” to “discuss” Canadian content.

In a formal sense, a “policy direction” and “discussion” is not as blatant a transgression against the CRTC’s independence from government as it seems.

The Broadcasting Act contemplates the federal government issuing to the CRTC “directions of general application on broad policy matters with respect to…any of the objectives of the regulatory policy set out in section 5(2),” a laundry list of broad regulatory goals.

But the statute does not permit a cabinet policy direction to overrule or modify the specific orders of a CRTC decision concerning streamers. Ironically, in drafting the Online Streaming Act the government intentionally denied itself this more direct power to second guess CRTC rulings in application to foreign streamers, while retaining the kill switch for rulings that involve licensed Canadian broadcasters.

So given the government’s self imposed restriction on the legal power to overrule the CRTC and the necessity to rely entirely on policy directions of “general application on broad policy matters,” how can the Carney and Miller instruct the CRTC to set cash levies at zero? And how can they dictate a specific number other than 15% for direct investments in Canadian content?

In the Broadcasting Act‘s formal process for issuing such a “broad” direction, minister Miller gets an otherwise forbidden face-to-face with the CRTC commissioners because of the federal cabinet’s statutory duty to “consult” the CRTC before publishing its marching orders in the Canada Gazette. It’s an opportunity for, um, candour that might not be appropriate in a published policy direction. Let’s not expect the meeting to be open to the media.

Depending on how this all plays out, it’s possible that some interested party might sue the Carney government for stretching too far the meaning of a “direction of general application on broad policy matters.”

There’s already litigation on the very same point. Telco provider SaskTel has gone to Federal Court of Appeal to challenge the federal cabinet’s very specific directions to the CRTC on requiring SaskTel and other telcos to rent out aggregated high-speed access on its wireline network to other Internet retailers. The legalese of the Telecommunications Act on “policy directions” is the same as the Broadcasting Act.

The majority Carney government probably is not agonizing over potential lawsuits. To speak plainly, the Liberals say they have an annual budget of $600 million in their pocket to replace $200 million in streamer levies and otherwise make supporters of Canadian content happy.

All of this is in the name of rewarding American trade pressure and the constant ratcheting threats of more American trade pressure.

Last November, members of a key US Congressional committee expressed their thanks to Canada for repealing our digital services tax and asked us to do the same with the Online Streaming Act.

Now that’s what I call friendship.

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Village Media expands to middle America – Meta says Canadian news ban is good for its stock price – Paramount and US states face off over Warner Bros. merger

Facebook post, Narcity Canada

July 25, 2026

The late and first Lord Thomson of Fleet, Canada’s Roy Thomson, built the ground floor of his media empire on home turf in northern Ontario. During the 1930s and 1940s he expanded into a string of radio stations and 20 daily Canadian newspapers, most of them in mid sized and small towns. He bought the British establishment newspaper, The Times. Today his grandson David Thomson owns the Globe and Mail and the global media giant Thomson Reuters.

Now that’s a tough act to follow but Village Media’s Jeff Elgie seems to have picked up the Thomson vibe, if not the empire.

Village Media is a network of digital community media websites in 27 modestly sized Ontario communities. Like Thomson, Elgie started in Ontario’s near north.

This week Elgie announced a joint venture of a further 15 community sites in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Illinois in partnership with the Knight Foundation, the well known American charitable fund with close historical ties to news journalism. The partners will quite literally find out whether the Village business model plays in Peoria, Illinois.

Including Peoria, the tentative list of fifteen US communities are all under 115,000 in population.

The green light for launch in each case will depend upon Elgie’s success in recruiting the local staff he wants. Village will run the network day to day and control editorial.

Village Media’s business model is strictly digital publishing, 100% ad supported, and seeks out smaller markets that have a strong local identity but an unsaturated supply of local journalism: watering news deserts, in other words.

Unlike many single-outlet Canadian digital news start-ups, Village’s multi-location network provides operational scale and financial ballast for launching start-ups in additional communities.

And although Elgie has licensed his proprietary digital publishing software to Canadian community news networks outside of Ontario, he has yet to expand his own operations into other provinces.

He told me that his move across the border into the US market was motivated by the right market opportunity and the personal connections between Village (whose board is chaired by Google’s former VP News Richard Gingras) and the Knight Foundation.

Knight is investing in the three state news network. Unlike Canadian charitable tax rules, US laws permit “program related investments” in for-profit news journalism. According to Elgie, it is possible that Knight might liquidate its investment in a couple of years if its collaboration with Village Media is successful and move on to similar local news projects in other states.

Elgie says he is not ruling out future expansion for Village Media into other Canadian markets but for now the US project with Knight fits within his corporate bandwidth.

***

For months MediaPolicy has been following this story: is Meta cheating on its ban on postings of Canadian news articles on Facebook and Instagram?

The Meta ban began in August 2023 as a legal maneuver designed to escape from mandatory licensing payments under the Online News Act. That left Google as the only “digital news intermediary” liable to make payments to Canadian news outlets.

It took 18 months of Meta’s news ban being in place before a Canadian news entity —in this case, the “LITS” coalition of local independently-owned television stations— challenged it by filing a complaint with the CRTC. The LITS allegation is that despite its “news ban” Meta turns a blind eye to the posting of original Canadian news content by unbanned news outlets or by ordinary Canadian citizens.

Meanwhile, mainstream news outlets, their news reporting, and even their opinion commentary all remain banned from the two Meta platforms.

LITS wants the CRTC to name Meta as a digital media intermediary under the Online News Act in order to trigger the mandatory news licensing scheme in the statute.

The legal filings are complete now. The Commission closed its portal for public comment (File 2026-0066-8) at the end of March.

Meta’s lawyer filed its response in April (see the letter below). Meta says it tries its best to maintain the integrity of its ban by deleting hyperlinks to original news content as users post them. Of interest to legal beagles, Meta insists the posting of news content screen shots falls outside the Online News Act’s definition of the “news.”

The days pass like months in Ottawa but the CRTC may some day sort out the LITS allegations of which Exhibit A is that Meta allows Rogers City-TV to post digital content from its Breakfast Television show while blocking digital content from BT’s direct morning show competitor, Hamilton’s CHCH-TV.

MediaPolicy’s Exhibit B (not filed at the Commission) is that Meta has allowed Narcity Canada to post breaking news stories from Canadian Press on a daily basis. Canadian Press qualifies as a news outlet under the Online News Act.

Mostly a travel and lifestyle site, Narcity does not publish enough of its own original news to qualify for federal QCJO subsidies and, by implication, news payments under the Online News Act. According to Narcity CEO Chuck Lapointe, he signed Meta’s waiver that says Narcity is not a “news outlet” under the Online News Act and will not claim compensation from Meta.

In case you think I am nitpicking about the selective nature of the news ban, a recent academic study found that Narcity is now the leading Canadian publisher of news on Instagram (the study did not have data on Facebook posts).

In this graph from the study, note which Canadian news organizations lead in posts and engagement on YouTube and TikTok, compared to Meta’s news-embargoed Instagram:

And in case you are wondering why Canadian Press did not intervene in the CRTC proceeding initiated by LITS and has nothing to say about CP content being published daily on Facebook and Instagram by Narcity, well so am I. My direct inquiry to Canadian Press on this matter did not elicit a reply.

In related news, the municipal council of Sturgeon County in the greater Edmonton region had Meta’s Canadian spokesperson Rachel Curran in front of them last week to answer questions about the $13 billion data centre planned for the area.

When the questions turned from the proposed data centre to the Meta news ban, Curran had a quotable defence for it:

“These publishers share information and articles on our platforms because it benefits them in the form of distribution. We have a responsibility not to do things that are going to unnecessarily exert downward pressure on our stock price.”

CRTC redacted Meta Response t 08-MAY-2026 Download

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Paramount can see the finish line in obtaining approval of its $111 USD billion merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. But first it faces a court hearing in two weeks: numerous Attorney Generals for California and 12 other states will ask for an injunction blocking the deal while they seek to derail the merger on anti-trust grounds.

Paramount’s Ellison family ownership has the wind at its back. The US Department of Justice took a pass on blocking the merger and this week both Canadian and European Union competition authorities did the same.

Paramount is offering the courts a legal justification that will be familiar to Canadians who followed the Rogers-Shaw merger, blessed by the CRTC in 2022: that no matter how big a streamer, film studio and television company that Paramount becomes, it’s still a smaller media conglomerate than Netflix, Google, or Apple.

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Plan B for AI’s content theft – AI scorecards of news journalism – does Canada Post neutralize news subsidies? – minister Miller’s book briefing

July 18, 2026

News publishers around the world are about to get their asses handed to them by AI companies. And they know it.

What to do? Well there’s Plan A and there’s Plan B.

Plan A is for news publishers to combat the AI chatbots’ illegal scraping of digital news content by filing lawsuits seeking license payments. On that score, sympathetic legislatures could move the needle on compensating news publishers faster, more lucratively, and more broadly to all news publishers by legislating clear copyright ownership of the content that AI chatbots are ingesting without paying for it.

Something like Plan A has been tried before, as you recall.

Over the last decade, the European Union, Australia and Canada have legislated a fair market in news licensing payments from Google and Meta with mixed success.

Landing in Canada as the Online News Act, Bill C-18 was a classic anti-trust remedy to the monopoly power held by Google and Meta over the ad-supported distribution of digital news hyperlinks and snippets on search engines and social media.

The legislated backstop of commercial arbitration meant that the “net exchange value” —-an independent measurement of the offsetting monetary value of publishers’ news content versus Google and Meta’s traffic referrals back to news sites — rebalanced bargaining power over news licensing payments from the monopolists in favour of hundreds of news publishers.

Once Bill C-18 became law, Google opted to pony up $100 million annually to Canadian news publishers. Deciding not to face the music of an independent assessment of net exchange value, Meta banned mainstream news from appearing on Facebook and Instagram.

Despite American trade pressure, Mark Carney hasn’t given away our Online News Act. But his obeisance to Donald Trump on the digital services tax —introduced to counteract Big Tech tax avoidance — and his climb down on the CRTC’s levies on Netflix and the foreign streamers are unnerving to say the least.

By contrast, Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese has been outspoken and defiant while moving slowly on implementing a new law that would put down the same mutiny that Meta staged in 2024 when its first and only licensing deal with Australian publishers expired.

In a recent speech at Sydney University, Albanese outlined a vision on AI that might have been cribbed straight from Carney’s “AI for All” national policy until he went where Carney wouldn’t go: support for copyright and creators’ IP:

But let me make this crystal clear: not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs. Not at all. Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work. Anything less, is theft. No country has got this right yet. Nowhere do artists or rights holders have sufficient control of their work, when it comes to AI training.

That is why the best way to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists is for Australia to be active and involved. To build the best possible solution for ourselves. And to preserve the creativity that is fundamental to who we are to our national identity and the journalism that is essential to our democratic society.

Stirring words, but talk is cheap. Plan A on AI news licensing is still just a plan. Remember how hard it can be to execute.

I would be surprised if news publishers aren’t spending every day contemplating a Plan B, i.e. how to survive AI without government intervention.

The question is what kind of ingenuity and resources can news publishers bring to the table that would change the balance of commercial bargaining power between them and the AI companies? How do news publishers negotiate licensing deals that give them fair compensation, brand visibility, and drive audience traffic back to their proprietary websites?

One of many ideas is news companies charging AI chatbots micropayments instead of selling them all-access licenses. Previously, pay-per-article failed as a news subscription strategy because, as Substacker Ulrike Langer puts it, “micropayments turn every act of consumption into a small purchasing decision, and humans will pay extra [in the form of an all-access monthly subscription] to be spared that unwelcome feeling.”

But could it be different if the news subscribers were emotionless AI scrapers trolling for just the right on-time content to satisfy the latest AI prompt? Langer isn’t sure, but whatever the potential in that kind of innovation might be, it surely isn’t a game changer for news publishers (although perhaps AI micropayments would be better than nothing for the small news publishers likely to be shut out of big licensing deals).

Making a real difference in this unequal contest of commercial leverage may depend upon the brand power of trusted news outlets. If AI companies want their own subscribers to trust their news content over the information offered by competing AI chatbots, they will pay bigger licensing fees to news organizations that are hitting it out of the park on audience trust.

This graphic from a recent academic study, the “The News Canadians Actually See,” illustrates how deeply skeptical Canadians remain about getting their news from an AI chatbot instead of traditional media.

We should probably assume that Plan B is only a plan for the very best and biggest news organizations.

That brings us back to Plan A, which is a legislative intervention to rebalance the bargaining power between Big Tech and Little News.

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Speaking of hitting it out of the park on brand trust, I’ve been opining about trust in news journalism in my last two posts and perhaps I should stop. But not just yet.

South of the border, Big Tech titan Peter Thiel is bankrolling a couple of AI businesses doing interesting things with journalism.

State Affairs is a news organization that hires journalists to report from US state legislatures. It feeds their reporting into an AI news product. In other words, it’s a hybrid human/AI news outlet (see Plan B, above).

State Affairs’ co-founder Evan Burns told The Washington Post that “AI can’t build sources. It can’t ask follow-up questions. It can’t go knock on the doorframe of the chief of staff of the whatever.”

Less altruistically, the media-hostile Thiel is also the money behind The Primary, an AI-fueled rating agency for news organizations and individual journalists. The Primary publishes a trust scorecard. Here are the ratings of news outlets and here is another scoring of bylined journalists (including those that report on the AI companies that Thiel owns).

The Primary scores don’t seem outrageously skewed although they definitely suggest a right-of-centre standpoint (for example, the New York Times is rubbished).

The idea of a media watchdog keeping tabs on journalist watchdogs is hardly new: media criticism podcasts and columns abound. But the marriage of media criticism and AI tools is new.

AI analysis of bias in media is just getting off the ground in Canada. A few months ago, Substacker David Clinton of The Audit published an AI-assisted review of CBC News coverage. Honest Reporting Canada did something similar on the “emotional sympathy” extended to various news subjects and public actors in CBC’s coverage of the Gaza conflict.

There are also media websites like Briefly News which appears to use AI tools to rate global news companies for bias and trust. You will find two Canadian outlets there, the CBC and the Globe & Mail. The site has no masthead, corporate information or country of origin.

The idea of a machine intelligence stepping forward to referee disputes over news bias has its allure for anyone looking to comment upon trustworthy news journalism.

It would be premature to say that right now that AI tools can reliably improve our ability to measure fairness in news journalism. But I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about it a lot more.

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In the centrifuge of public policy and competing priorities, sometimes governments do things at cross purposes.

Take the example of the federal government and its historic support for small, mostly rural community newspapers. Since before Confederation, we have subsidized news outlets. At first it was through discounted postal rates and subsequently through direct subsidies in the Canada Periodical Fund, all pre-dating the more controversial journalism labour tax credits for daily and mostly urban newspapers.

I don’t need to re-tell the story of how the advertising market was captured by digital platforms and undermined the business model of community newspapers, subsidized as they were. I reckon the federal government is now paying 50 cents on each dollar of publisher costs.

On a completely separate track from newspapers (and under the aegis of a different government department), Canada Post met its own paradigmatic shift in its legacy business model by going all in on door-to-door distribution of retailer ad flyers, piggybacked on its regular mail delivery.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, the “Admail” Canada Post program has undercut newspaper companies who depend on flyer distribution as a major stream of revenue, offering free editorial content wrapped around local retail advertising inserts. There’s a chapter and verse history of the next thirty years in a News Media Canada op ed published today.

Fast forward, the problem just got worse. Enter the Montreal-headquartered Transcontinental, a national printer and distributor of local retail flyers through Raddar, its printing and home delivery program. Instead of a free newspaper and a bundle of flyer inserts, Raddar prints a single aggregated advertising flyer.

This spring Raddar struck a deal with Canada Post to break into new markets across the country by contracting for national Admail delivery on a discount offered by the Post Office at a rate that local news publishers can’t match.

This week the Winnipeg Free Press announced it is laying off its network of 817 distribution contractors that support its flyer business and shuttering the companion editorial product, the Free Press Community Review. That cedes the 200,000 local household market to the federally-owned Canada Post and Transcontinental. With that, goes 10% of the Free Press’s overall revenue, according to its publisher.

This looks like a case of cross-purposed public policy: the federal government’s revenue strategy for Canada Post submarines a major source of commercial revenue of the news publishers whom it subsidizes with federal money.

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A few months ago I reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. It’s a policy pitch for a better federal policy on supporting Canadian book publishers and authors.

As a follow up on that I think you will enjoy reading Ken Whyte’s last two Substacks on the same topic here and here.

The acid-tongued commentary asks why culture and identity minister Marc Miller asked his civil servants for an update on Canadian book publishing policy and got back advice that ignored whether it was effective. The answer might be that the minister didn’t ask that question, but perhaps he will now.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – AI news scraping deal in Australia – who will pay for non-partisan journalism? – two paths to liberal democracy

July 12, 2026

Canadians are familiar with the story of the Online News Act. True policy nerds know that it’s part of a bigger story in which Google and Meta grappled with mandatory news licensing in the European Union, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Something similar might be playing out again between digital news publishers and global AI companies. But it is in its early stages, as large news publishers with lots of content to offer, and a modicum of leverage, choose between launching copyright lawsuits against AI companies or settling for licensing agreements. Here’s a list.

The latest news —- relevant to Canada because it occurred in our parallel policy universe, Australia—- is that Microsoft Co-Pilot has a content deal with Nine News (roughly, the equivalent of Canada’s Bell Media) to license its digital news content. Neither party is saying if cheques are being written, but certainly audience traffic will flow.

Co-Pilot has licensed Nine’s paywalled content as feedstock for its AI summaries but will embed Nine’s hyperlinks and enough paywalled content to push Co-Pilot consumers back to Nine’s full stories.

As Ulrike Langer wrote last week, publishers of premium news content such as Time, The Economist, and Dow Jones are making different kinds of AI deals that license content scraping in different ways: full archive access, data-only access, or journalism-only access.

The beginnings of a commercial market in AI-digested news content is an obvious way that AI companies can deflect or minimize any government efforts to come to the rescue of domestic news companies getting illegally scraped by the AI giants. Google and Meta did something similar a decade ago. They made voluntary agreements with a cherry-picked assortment of big media companies until sovereign governments decided to back the claims of news companies that Google and Meta bargained unfairly or not at all because they were monopolists in Search and social media.

The prevalence of ongoing copyright lawsuits against the AI companies suggests that news companies again believe they are getting ripped off but don’t have the leverage to get adequate settlements without the intervention of their domestic judiciaries. Yet litigation is a long and uncertain path and it’s probably a non-starter strategy for local publishers anyway.

At some point, sovereign nations are going to think about legislating mandatory licensing of news content by AI companies with a dispute resolution mechanism that drives a fair market price. You might have heard of the idea.

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Editorial strategy in news journalism hasn’t changed much over time: most publishers curate their news feed with “biased” or standpoint content stemming from a politically partisan, ideologically driven or simply a “watchdog” philosophy of keeping an eye on powerful political and corporate actors.

It’s hardly a secret that publishers are keenly aware of who their audience is, particularly their paying audience.

As the advertising revenue stream for professional news journalism continues to collapse, two public policy imperatives meet: providing the people with fair and balanced news content and getting them to pay for it. Only 12% of Canadians pay for or share a digital news subscription, a stubborn statistic that hardly moves from year to year.

The policy sweet spot is to foster a commercial market in broad spectrum news reporting on current affairs that gets citizens out of their self-imposed filter bubbles, whether on social media or from conventional news sources.

The newly released 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report offers some audience data that’s relevant to what readers want and, perhaps, what they will pay for.

The report includes an inquiry by Denmark’s highly esteemed Rasmus Nielsen where polling respondents were asked to declare the strength of their allegiances to news sources they considered neutral, ideologically comfortable, or offering an editorial standpoint that challenged their own.

As you can see from this graph above a strong plurality of respondents fancied their favoured news source were neutral. But significant minorities openly declared their allegiances to either intellectually comforting or challenging news sources.

Here’s Nielsen’s take away from his research:

But the outsize role played by the minority who seek partisanship is easier to understand when we take into account that those who say they prefer news from sources that share their point of view are, in our survey data, also more likely to:

Share and comment on news online and on social media

Be very or extremely interested in news and in politics

Place themselves on the left or the right of the political spectrum

Access news many times daily and pay for online news

The people who prefer news that aligns with their own views are a minority. But they tend to be more vocal, more highly engaged, more partisan, and more commercially important for many news publishers than the public at large.

I’ll translate that passage as “an audience that is very tuned in to politics with very clear political views of their own will pay for news.”

This is not surprising, is it.

For Canadians, this troubling disconnect between the willingness to pay for news and non-partisan content leads us back to another conclusion: the important role of CBC Radio-Canada as a news content provider for citizens who stubbornly won’t pay for news.

To change tack here, Nielsen also makes some other conclusions from the data with the benefit of polling from around the world.

The first is that there is a correlation between audience preferences for ideologically friendly news sources and the prevalence of social media as a news platform. Not a surprise either.

Another is that perhaps we in the global north and citizens that enjoy the privilege of living in liberal democracies ought not to be too judgmental about that lack of journalistic detachment in autocracies and conflict zones.

“When core democratic institutions or the fundamental rights of whole swaths of the public are under concerted political attack,” says Nielsen, “what does it mean to report the news in a way that doesn’t have a particular point of view?”

Discuss.

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Open to being pleasantly amused? I recommend a short and compelling weekend read written by a friend of mine, historian David Wilson (among many endeavours, he has just stepped down from a ten-year stint as the editor of the prestigious Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

Published last week on the American July 4th holiday, Wilson asks whether the birth of the republic was a better choice than Canada’s own (but more patient) path to independence and responsible government. A cheeky but serious piece, worth your five minutes.

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COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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