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October 5, 2025
There is a good analysis piece by Gretel Kahn that reviews the distribution of the $100 million Bill C-18 Google payments to Canadian news outlets and the Meta ban on Canadian news.
The criticisms from various publishers and commentators on where the Google money landed are fairly predictable. Mainstream media, especially the US-controlled Postmedia chain, come in for a bashing and the most vivid quote comes from Christopher Curtis, the online publisher of local news outlet The Rover, who opines that “this whole thing has been a huge gift for foreign-owned legacy media and a spit in the face of small outlets like ours and Indigenous-owned outlets.”
Got it.
The fresh stuff that Kahn digs out is how news outlets are adapting to the Meta ban on Canadian news. One publisher points out that Meta’ s traffic referrals to news sites were falling well before Mark Zuckerberg responded to the Online News Act Bill C-18 by banishing most news organizations from his platform.
Many of these publishers are figuring out work arounds on Meta applications, buying Facebook ads to promote their hyperlinked news or posting unlinked news items on Instagram. Others are leaning more heavily on YouTube and TikTok distribution. As one publisher comments in the story, it’s “better not to build on rented land,” a nod to heavier reliance on their own e-mail and subscription distribution instead of Search and Social platforms.
But all of that may be yesterday’s problem. The new disruptors of journalism are the Internet-scraping AI companies, including the same Big Tech platforms that make news available through hyperlinked news snippets.
Canada’s Online News Act C-18 doesn’t regulate AI ingestion of Canadian news content. So far, the AI companies have got away with being the dog that eats your book, barfs it, and claims the ingestion was okay because it’s no longer a book.
If the Liberal government has any concern about that, or any interest in amending copyright law to get at the problem more quickly, it has yet to show such interest.
In the meantime, the referrals of audience traffic from AI-enhanced search engines to news sites are way down. Yet a news report suggests that the few AI companies deigning to make licensing agreements with a handful of news agencies are sending more traffic to these chosen outlets. In these early days, the AI horizon facing news organizations appears to range from catastrophic to not-so-catastrophic scenarios and the question of which news sites get licensing deals may be determinative. If this sounds like the problem of oligopoly in content distribution that lead to Bill C-18, it should.
Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon just announced the advisory panel for his federal AI Strategy Task Force. The list of strategic priorities does not include news media. The panel is dominated by experts on AI development and economic opportunities. The only member appointed to the 23-person panel who is focussed on the downside harms to the media ecosystem is McGill University’s Taylor Owen.
Whatever is coming from AI, so far the Liberal government does not seem interested in riding to the rescue of the media or creative industries. The Parliamentary Heritage committee is scheduling hearings beginning October 6th and 8th that may put the issue into the public policy spotlight.
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The Bari Weiss deal is done now. The iconoclastic publisher of The Free Press has sold her publication to the newly consolidated Paramount, owned by David Ellison.
Weiss becomes the editor-in-chief of CBS News and, given her MAGA affinities, the editorial curation of the mainstream broadcaster could change.
Paramount joins Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery (CNN, TBS), Disney (ABC, ESPN) and Comcast (NBC) as a media superpower in both news and sports & entertainment. But Ellison has a special edge and the potential to dominate global media to the extent that he works in cooperation with his father Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. Ellison pater is expected to become a significant minority owner of the US-operations of TikTok once that deal with Chinese-owned ByteDance is consummated.
The Washington Post has a good story on the Ellisons, their businesses, and their relationships with the White House.
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I have two recommendations for weekend listening.
For those of you who read my review of David Cayley’s new book on the CBC, you may enjoy (a) reading the book, or (b) listening to Tara Henley’s excellent podcast interview of the author.
And if you want to listen to an interview full of unexpected personal insights, I recommend the engrossing New York Times podcast interview of the actor, artist and activist Sean Penn. The interview was recorded in two parts, divided chronologically by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.
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