Catching up on MediaPolicy.ca – Postmedia layoffs – Rogers Shaw update – Home Depot gave your email to Facebook – US DOJ targets Google’s AdTech – US trade threats, again.

January 29, 2023

Yet again another bloodletting in print journalism.

This week Postmedia announced an 11% staff cut across its entire news chain. Within the week the redundancy notices will begin and by the end of February we will know who is leaving through buy-outs or layoffs.

The decision came two weeks after a quarterly report highlighting a double digit percentage decrease in advertising and circulation revenues. Asset sales allowed Postmedia to pay down and lower its first-lien debt to $41 million.

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Last week was an eventful period for the Rogers-Shaw merger, most significantly the Federal Court of Appeal’s rejection of the Competition Commissioner’s appeal.

MediaPolicy.ca’s take is posted here: it’s now time to move past the politics of the merger and put our energy into the federal government’s review of competition legislation.

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Shopped at Home Depot Canada lately?

Big Orange and Meta have been unmasked by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner for their secret deal to aggregate customer data from e-mailed receipts.

Home Depot used the customer data on products, pricing and personal e-mail addresses with the help of a Facebook tool to verify the effectiveness of Home Depot digital advertisements. It then sold the data to Meta.

As any shopper knows, no customer consent was asked or given. Home Depot told the Privacy Commissioner your consent was implied by shopping there.

As of October, Home Depot stopped misappropriating the data. Still, it reserves the ‘right’ to do so.

The Privacy Commissioner has no sanctions available, but Bill C-27 is intended to change that.

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Perhaps we have buried this above-the-fold story.

The US Department of Justice announced this week that it is at last filing a complaint under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against Google for its abuse of market power in digital advertising, specifically its AdTech business.

This targets the core of Google’s enterprise and has very much caught the attention of market analysts.

The Canadian Bureau of Competition walked away from the AdTech file in 2016.

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MediaPolicy.ca recently posted two chapters in the history of US-Canada trade disputes over cultural goods. Our conclusion was this: the US will always try to bully Canada with allegations of cultural protectionism. Sometimes the complaints have some legal merit, but usually they have none.

Hugh Stephens of the University of Calgary analyzes the latest American threats to “retaliate” against Bills C-11 and C-18.

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