journalism – MediaPolicy.ca

Is an AI asteroid coming for Canadian news journalism?

(AI illustration)

October 17, 2026

When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei blew the whistle on his own rogue AI agents as a civilizational threat to humankind, he did so the day after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the last time the world stood still all at once and faced its fears.

But since Amodei’s shock declaration, we’ve seen more denialism than public policy action. The Trump administration has scrambled to defuse demands for the regulation of AI.

Amodei’s sensational revelations of AI’s existential threat to the human race briefly eclipsed the existing concerns about lesser cataclysmic outcomes. Like mass unemployment. Or a collapse in AI valuations that crashes the global economy.

Another cataclysm may be the threat that AI poses to news journalism. Like an AI asteroid slamming into the blue planet of democracy.

Since 2018, the Silicon Valley AI companies have scraped online content from across the Internet, including news outlets.

The content was taken without permission, consent or a nickel changing hands. It was nevertheless fed into the training of AI large language models. The training data taught the LLMs the machine-learning skills and vocabulary required to move to the next stage of their development.

After their Internet-wide raid for training data, the next step for AI companies was to refresh their data by scraping up to date information on current affairs, the better to answer millions of audience queries each day.

Again this massive content capture has mostly been carried out without permission, consent or compensation to the content’s creators.

As a consequence many of these content creators, especially news companies, are suing the AI companies. The litigation will ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court. In that courtroom, the AI companies can count on the political and legal support of the Trump Department of Justice.

Among the stronger of the lawsuits filed by news outlets, publishers will zero in on AI large language models that output verbatim replication of their content. Plaintiffs will also direct the court’s attention to the emergence of these news-juiced AI chatbots as head-on competitors to news outlets.

But the law may never deliver a big payday for news outlets (nor music or book publishers).

American courts are confined to a finding of copyright violation based on existing US law. It’s a tangle of legal issues, but in general that jurisprudence bends favourably to “fair use” and the permissible “transformative” republication of what most laypersons would ordinarily assume is intellectual property belonging to those who created it. If the US Supreme Court sides with AI companies, Canadian courts will feel that legal gravitational pull. Canadian news publishers are suing OpenAI and Anthropic. The Toronto Star is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in New York against Cohere, the leading Canadian AI company.

In the meantime, a glimmer of hope is the sprouting of green shoots in a market of content licensing that might put AI compensation in the pockets of at least some of the news companies.

But as the Brookings Institute’s Courtney Radsch describes in this explainer, AI companies have so far inked only a limited number of confidential deals with large, premium-branded news outlets.

For example, OpenAI has agreements with The Financial Times, the Berlin-headquartered global publisher Axel Springer and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google has a deal with Reddit. Microsoft has a deal with HarperCollins. The competing lists of lawsuits and licensing deals have to be constantly updated.

Could this nascent licensing market save news journalism?

It’s hard to say. At this early stage in the development of a content market, those bespoke deals may serve to relieve the public policy pressure on the AI companies by snuffing out potentially adverse legal rulings on liability. It’s those kind of judicial slap downs of tech companies that often create the political momentum for public regulation (think about the knock-on effect of successful litigation against Meta’s social media algorithms that boosted support for legislative action against online harms).

Also disappointing, the commodity metrics generated in these special deals between AI companies and news publishers might establish the market information required for the dynamic pricing of news content. Unfortunately the price of licensed content remains confidential. This commercial secrecy deprives an immature licensing market of the information it needs to take root and grow.

For now, the giant AI companies don’t care about news outlets any more than they have to. Why would they? Expect them to press their advantage of market power over news outlets for as long as they have it. And don’t expect them to strike licensing deals with any but the biggest news brands (although there’s an interesting exception to that I will get to below).

I hope I am wrong. If efforts to establish a functioning market in AI content licensing fail, it may end up choking off audience traffic and revenue for any but the largest news companies.

At least in the pre-AI era there existed a value exchange between Big Tech and news publishers. Google and Meta amassed free hyperlinks for themselves and in return gave news publishers free distribution of their content. Publishers could monetize that free distribution by selling ads and subscriptions to the audience that engaged. The big news organizations could and did go further by obtaining cash licensing agreements with Google and Meta.

The Brookings Institute’s Radsch compares the impact of both conventional Search platforms and AI chatbots on the news ecosystem and concludes that with chatbots “it’s the same arc, only faster.”

But unlike the old market in hyperlinked news snippets, the structure of the emerging AI business model never shares any revenue-earning opportunities with content providers except so far for the lucky few. That’s because it doesn’t offer news outlets distribution of their content.

It’s common now to warn that conventional search traffic reaching hyperlinked content is doomed. Projections vary, but AI is rapidly replacing hyperlink Search and traffic referrals are drying up because the purpose of AI chatbots is to leave little reason for users to click through a hyperlink to a news site, assuming the fulsome AI summary even bothers to provide one.

This leads to the further problem of AI chabots “eating their own seed corn.” That’s a scenario where the chatbots are so effective in replacing Search and social media feeds as the dominant portal for online information that they starve the news outlets that provide the chatbots with information in the first place.

If a mature market in AI licensing of content throughout the news ecosystem doesn’t happen, what then?

We know from experience where Google and Meta’s refusal to cooperate in a licensing market in hyperlinked news snippets lead in the end: governments in Europe, Australia and Canada stepped in and legislated an unambiguous intellectual property claim that news outlets could make against Google and Meta for hyperlinked news snippets. In Canada, that got us the Online News Act.

As yet there is little sign of North American governments taking any action on the chatbot problem.

But this time around, at least it seems that news publishers are better organized and, for the moment, engaging in some self help.

For now it’s baby steps. A broad based publisher boycott of AI scraping, which is technically possible by blocking digital robots from their websites, does not look like it’s in the cards.

However websites can block scrapers if they can’t obtain licensing deals on acceptable terms.

As well, the AI companies are not the monoliths as the Google and Meta monopolies have been in the hyperlink markets in Search and Social, there are as yet no comparable monopoly platforms in the AI market. So news providers could plausibly find commercial leverage by blocking some AI companies while making deals with others.

But as the Brooking Institute’s Radsch and others have pointed out, the deals are not flowing through the entire news ecosystem.

Hoping that may change, major publishers without licensing deals have come together and agreed upon a technical infrastructure for tracking and measuring the chatbots’ use of the online content that news outlets are willing to leave unblocked and available for license. The “SPUR coalition” was founded by leading British news outlets, joined by French and European partners but tellingly only one American news organization, the New York Times. All of the major Canadian publishers have signed on.

Another feature of the green shoots licensing market is a layer of intermediary tech companies that offer their platforms for the digital exchange of licensed content between AI chatbots and publishers. Effectively, the intermediaries act as copyright collectives. Naturally, they take a handsome cut of licensing revenue in doing so. For now, these companies like Cloudflare remain out of the clutches of the AI companies. If the experience of Google establishing a monopoly in digital advertising exchanges repeats itself, the AI companies will try to acquire this layer of intermediaries.

Without being able to predict the shape of a future AI chatbot market in content licensing, it would be nevertheless risky to expect that it would produce good outcomes (or any outcomes at all) for news outlets operating in the local news space, below the waterline of global and national brands.

After all, it was the inability to extend the licensing market in hyperlinked news snippets beyond the news outlets cherrypicked by Google and Meta that lead to the Online News Act.

Perhaps this cynicism could be checked if we were to see more evidence of licensing agreements across the broader news ecosystem.

Last month the Ontario-based Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie, a relentless innovator in community publishing, announced he has a deal with OpenAI. AI technology will power Village’s “Open Door” widget that connects users with community and health resources. If it’s popular, Open Door will draw traffic and build audience loyalty, encouraging readers to stay on his ad-supported news sites and read more stories and click on more ads.

In return, Village has licensed its news content to OpenAI. It’s not clear if money changed hands.

Courtesy of Village Media

Still, it’s a rare licensing deal for a local publisher. Others news outlets might emulate Village. Let’s wait and see.

More likely news outlets will focus on rapid adoption of newsroom AI tools, improving their human-made journalism by exploiting those tools for better content and even monetization. For example, agentic commerce.” News outlets might create “shopping carts” for ordinary news seekers employing AI agents to purchase their articles as part of a daily update package.

If the first 30 years of the Internet is any guide, the speed and path of consumer adoption of AI products will dictate the available opportunities for news entrepreneurs. Some newsrooms will adapt wonderfully. Small and medium sized news businesses, with limited capital and infrastructure, will probably struggle.

The fear is that most local news outlets won’t even have the breathing room to adapt and survive if consumer adoption of AI scales so quickly that chatbots become de facto news organizations and starve news outlets of audience.

In that bleak future, expect political pressure for governments to intervene in the news marketplace yet again in the name of democracy and public access to information.

If they do intervene, the starting point for public policy would be legislating an unambiguous right of intellectual property in news content, regardless of the fine points of copyright law or the outcome of lawsuits. The IP rights generate bargaining power.

The next policy move would be to build a licensing market on top of that rebalanced market power between AI companies and news outlets.

This is what the European Union, Canada and Australia tried to do with hyperlinked news snippets and it drove millions of dollars and euros in time-limited cash settlements. But it did not create a true licensing market. As we know, Big Tech refused to cooperate with legislators and missed its chance to help design a frictionless market platform for licensing news content. The result was that the commodity price for news licensing was effectively negotiated or legislated as a headcount of employed journalists rather than the market value of the journalism they produced.

The same governments see the approaching AI asteroid threatening news journalism.

As was the case with the market in hyperlinked news, the European Union is out front on AI.

An EU legal framework requires AI companies to disclose their ingestion of news content and allow publishers to opt out of content scraping. This effectively establishes the missing property right for news publishers. The debate in EU Parliament has now turned towards setting up a voluntary licensing market in news content that delivers compensation to news outlets.

In a metaphor for Brexit, the United Kingdom initially showed interest in the EU approach and then backed away and adopted a “wait and see” position.

Australia is midway through government consultations that, according to press reports, will arm publishers with enforceable opt-outs from AI scraping and consider a plan for AI companies to deliver cash compensation for news content.

Image courtesy of Maryna Hryhorieva

In Canada, the Carney government is idling its policy engine, sticking to the path chosen by the United Kingdom rather than Europe or Australia .

Prime Minister Carney and his AI minister Evan Solomon have resisted competing proposals to create a clear property right in news content or, the reverse, adopt a US-style “text and data mining” exception to copyright law that would favour more permissionless AI scraping.

Our federal government’s lack of action could be motivated by any number of political, trade or policy reasons, not the least of which is a clogged pipeline of the government’s overall parliamentary agenda.

If Ottawa has any intention of intervening on behalf of news publishers, as it did with the Online News Act, it might be cooly sitting back to see what kind of heat the “first mover” policy makers in Europe and Australia take.

Call it a measure twice, cut once strategy. But while Ottawa is waiting to see what happens in other jurisdictions, the roulette-wheel litigation in American and Canadian courts may carve legal precedents into stone. That raises the prospect of Canadian public policy being set by the US Supreme Court.

***

In reflecting upon what I have written here, it occurs to me that public policy debate about news media takes place in a discourse that privileges innovation and open markets in information. As it should.

But in the end, we need fact based news reporting, by any means necessary. Democracy must defend itself from those who would exploit their rhetorical freedoms to deliberately undermine it (I’m thinking of Plato’s observation recounted in Richard Gingras’ most recent reflections).

It is the duty of political leaders, policy makers and citizens to strengthen an information ecosystem that facilitates, rather than frustrates, the democratic freedoms that allow a free and independent press to exist in the first place.

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Trust cascading Canadian journalism – Paramount wins the anti-trust battle – California signs off on news subsidies

October 4, 2026

Millions of students use AI to cheat on their assignments, or so we’ve heard.

So it is no surprise that someone claiming to be a independent journalist would use AI to deceive reputable news agencies.

“Daniel Robson,” now exposed as an alias, succeeded in publishing articles in a string of Canadian news and opinion outlets including The Ottawa Citizen, The Hub, Policy Options, the Montreal Gazette, Open Canada and the Western Standard while faking his identity with an AI photo illustration. He also used an AI large language model to write articles and his e-mail correspondence with editors.

Some of the editors had telephone calls with a human voice calling himself Daniel Robson.

But as the editor of Policy Options Les Perreaux confirmed after discovering the deception :

In reviewing our correspondence and the six other submissions the writer sent us which we did not publish, we have identified signs of AI assistance throughout. Image-analysis tools raised questions about the veracity of the photograph he supplied to us. Last October, he also declined an honorarium we occasionally offer to journalists who write for us – an unusual step for an emerging independent journalist.

We should have undertaken more verification before publication. I relied too heavily on the fact that work under Daniel Robson’s name had already appeared in other Canadian publications – a form of trust cascade in which publication itself becomes a credential.

The Globe & Mail, which noted it did not accept stories pitched by Robson, has a comprehensive news story here.

A more salacious story appears in the English-language Türkiye Today which alerted the duped Canadian news outlets. The gist of the story is that the mysterious Robson might be a Moroccan intelligence agent engaged in foreign interference with Canadian news outlets.

None of the Canadian news outlets are accusing the writer of civil or criminal fraud.

What struck me about the reporting on “Robson” was what I would call missing the forest for the trees.

This kind of deception —-including the most serious allegation of state-sponsored planting of stories—-is as old as analog. Large language model AI tools make it easier. Burned once by a “trust cascade” of successful publication elsewhere, newsroom editors will wise up. It’s a warning shot. We forgot that AI can do more than create deep fake videos for Russian bot farms to post on Facebook.

What should really concern us is a failure of our human imagination. A lesson is to be learned from the recent website hacking by autonomous AI agents that escaped their sandboxes at OpenAI and other companies.

In the context of journalism, contemplate a rogue “frontier model” AI agent, or an army of state sponsored AI agents, tirelessly probing with sophisticated array of audio, video, text and photo tools until it can pull off an undetected Robson-at-scale penetration of publishing software at multiple news outlets.

***

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently told the New York Times that one of the good things about building stronger Canadian ties with the European Union was that “the Europeans aren’t going to tell us what we have to put on our landing pages of Netflix or Spotify or whatever, and that stuff matters.”

That called for a MediaPolicy drill down on how the Europeans regulate Netflix and the Californian streamers. You can read about it in my post in Cartt.ca.

Also, I recently teamed up with Stephen Stohn to write in the Toronto Star about the importance of Carney standing up for the Online Streaming Act.

***

This week a US federal judge charged with hearing the anti-trust lawsuit brought by California’s Attorney-General and ten other states against the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger signed off on their out-of-court settlement.

The consensus opinion of the deal is that Paramount, owned by David Ellison and debt-financed by his friend-of-Trump father Larry, was the hands down winner.

You can read the bullet-point analysis in Axios. Deeper pieces are available from the New York Times or The Hollywood Reporter.

The settlement features only “behavioural remedies.” That means promises of post-merger good behaviour but no asset divestitures.

For example, the deal blesses Ellison’s ownership of competing cable news networks CBS and CNN on the condition that Ellison convene an editorial board to protect newsroom autonomy.

The outcome was a bit of a surprise.

California’s AG Rob Bonta held high value cards in this poker game. In court he could persuasively tell a judge that the merged studios would unfairly dominate competition between Hollywood studios, supported by major portfolios in cable television, news, and streaming video. He could win.

Bonta also figured to use Ellison’s financing against him in any settlement talks.

Not only is a big piece of the merger debt held against Ellison pater‘s personal fortune, the Ellisons were on the hook for $7 million daily payouts to Warner shareholders, beginning on October 1st, for any delay in getting court approval for the merger. The trial wasn’t even set to kick off until March 2027. That would be at least a $1.7 billion pill for Ellison to swallow.

But Ellison matched Bonta’s chips, smiled, and raised him. He made a bare knuckled threat to move Paramount studios and a successfully merged Warner Brothers out of California to another state. Bonta described this as “blackmail” and initially dug in.

Blackmail or no, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass begged for settlement. The big Hollywood unions split: IATSE and the Directors Guild for settlement, the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds opposed. The heir apparent to Gavin Newsom in the governor’s mansion, Xavier Becerra, was said to have been swayed by Ellison’s threat.

What tipped the balance was that Californian Democrats blinked. Perhaps eyeing the Democratic Presidential nomination for 2028, Newsom brokered the deal between Ellison and the states.

The deal does not oblige Ellison to keep Paramount Warner in California.

The whole episode was high drama and, for Canadians, reminds one of the Rogers-Shaw merger where the CRTC was sympathetic to Rogers’ pro-merger argument that shifted the focus away from market power wielded against rivals Bell and Telus and towards the creation of a stronger Canadian player fit to take on the media colossi of Netflix, Disney and YouTube. This was the same argument made by the Trump Department of Justice in supporting the Ellisons’ merger.

On a final note: US media is not saying anything about AG Bonta submitting to Governor Newsom. I’m no expert in Californian state law but it appears that the state’s Attorney General does not enjoy the same degree of autonomy from the Governor as we might expect in Canada.

***

As MediaPolicy noted three weeks ago, Californian Democrats pushed a news journalism state subsidy for local news through the state legislature.

Governor Newsom waited until the September 30th deadline and signed off on the bill despite some reservations.

In-state publishers and broadcasters with at least 33% of coverage of Californian current affairs are eligible.

The Californian Community News Act tracks Canada’s federal labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists although slightly skewed in favour of smaller news outlets. The Californian dollar amounts are comparable to the Canadian program: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter.

California’s projected budget allocation is $40M USD ($57M CDN), covering an estimated 2,600 journalists employed at 600 local news outlets. That is less than Canada’s $75M CDN program for news publishers, covering 3,900 journalists.

In the Californian bill, any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary, a feature rewarding newsroom expansion that Canada’s federal program does not include.

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

Mark Carney, Canada’s cultural export

September 24, 2026

In this historical moment, Prime Minister Mark Carney has become our greatest cultural export. He is considered in his pronouncements, good natured and unflappable. He is the global anti-Trump.

Occasionally, the imperious CEO gets loose. In a rare appearance in the House of Commons for Question Period, Carney was obliged to grind out the parry and return of Opposition barbs.

Having gamely returned service to Pierre Poilievre’s first serves on issues of affordability, Carney swivelled to meet the incoming from Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet on the PM’s repeal of the Digital Services Tax and Netflix cash contributions to Canadian media funds.

“Mr. Speaker,” said Blanchet, “the Prime Minister personally cancelled contributions of any kind by tech giants to the economy or the arts in Quebec and Canada, including through taxes or content creation, simply to appease the American President. The effort fell flat. Although I remain unconvinced, the Prime Minister claims to have walked away from the negotiation table for language and culture-related reasons. Since the effort failed, should the Prime Minister consider reinstating the digital services tax and allowing cultural contributions by the web giants?“

After a reply offered in banal Parliamentary vocabulary, the Prime Minister steadied for Blanchet’s follow up volley.

Blanchet suggested that Carney’s strategy to build closer ties to the European Union meant that Canadian alignment with the EU’s bolder approach to digital taxes and streamer contributions would make sense after breaking off trade talks.

The Prime Minister stood up and delivered a curt, “No, Mr. Speaker.” And sat down. Pointe finale.

Now it helps to watch this on video so you can appreciate the dismissive tone and body language. The clip also captures the bemusement rippling through the Bloc MPs seated behind Blanchet.

As the Prime Minister probably appreciated afterwards, that kind of answer won’t cut it in Québec, a province that loves legislation regulating streamers so much it has two.

***

With the House of Commons sitting again, Parliamentary committees picked up from where they left off in the spring.

In the modern age of an all powerful Prime Minister’s Office, these independent committees frequently resemble teenager house parties when the parents go out of town. Don’t destroy the place and you can do much pretty much anything you want.

The Finance committee is chaired by Karina Gould, the Toronto–area MP and former cabinet minister who made an impressive run for the Liberal leadership in 2025. This week Gould delivered the Liberal committee majority’s report on public submissions for the upcoming 2026 budget.

It’s not all that newsworthy when the Finance Committee reports on its “pre-budget” consultation. Its MPs make loads of budget recommendations in policy areas already covered by fellow MPs sitting on other Parliamentary committees like Canadian Heritage. And in a Budget that remains in the tight fisted grip of the Finance Minister and the PM, the Finance MPs’ recommendations are far from being a first draft of the final Budget.

On culture, the Finance MPs made eleven recommendations.

Some are guaranteed never to see the light of day.

A recommendation that Internet Service Providers (i.e. Bell, Rogers, Québecor) begin paying the same five per cent culture levy that their cable divisions pay is a non-starter.

Recall how in June 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau humiliated Canadian Heritage committee chair and fellow Liberal MP Hedy Fry by holding a pre-emptive news conference to dismiss out of hand her committee’s recommendation favouring an ISP tax.

Other recommendations may be under more serious consideration by the PMO. For example, this omnibus recommendation on public spending on news journalism captures several of them:

Support the sustainability and growth of newsroom jobs by maintaining the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit at the current 35% rate and expanding eligibility criteria to include owner-operators, employees in broadcasting, and partners in news businesses. Budget 2026 should also direct at least 25% of federal advertising spending toward private-sector Canadian news outlets, address disparities in tax treatment for advertising, and extend the Local Journalism Initiative indefinitely to support the creation of original civic journalism in underserved communities.

The other recommendation that caught my eye was the strengthening of the intellectual property rights of news organizations in response to the ingestion of their content by AI large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude:

The committee further recommends that the Government of Canada protect Canadian news publishers’ intellectual property in the context of artificial intelligence by requiring government AI suppliers to commit to the principles of transparency, consent, and attribution when using copyright-protected content, requesting that the Competition Bureau examine competition issues in search and AI markets, including crawler practices.

And here is a companion recommendation that applies to any kind of Canadian media:

Ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) developers obtain permission and provide compensation for the use of copyright-protected works in training data, reject any new or expanded copyright exceptions for text and data mining, and require transparent disclosure and record-keeping of training sources to support a functioning licensing market.

There are many public policy issues packed into those two paragraphs.

But to news publishers, the issue is simple. They want to be compensated (or even asked permission) by the AI giants for ingesting their content, first for the “training data” that birthed the LLMs’ vocabulary and gave them the context to understand news content, and also for the “output” summaries that LLMs provide to inquisitive users like you and me.

The news publishers’ claim is that AI ingestion is not only without permission and compensation, it’s grabbing intellectual property that news publishers might use to make their own LLMs in open-sourced applications. As well, the LLMs are using ingested news content to create de facto news outlets that directly compete with the news publishers.

Faced with litigation from news publishers, the AI global giants have signed off some pick-and-choose deals with top news outlets.

It’s reminiscent of what happened ten years ago in news hyperlinking by Google and Facebook, ultimately leading to the Online News Act C-18. The web giants made a few deals on the cheap with big news organizations and stonewalled the smaller news publishers.

To those unlucky news outlets, the web giants offered instead free distribution of their hyperlinks in order to draw traffic to their websites. Even if that quid pro quo was ever adequately remunerative to publishers big and small for hyperlinks, it’s not on offer from AI companies for ingestion, including again Google and Meta.

That’s because the notion of an exchange value of “content for traffic” doesn’t apply to AI ingestion of news content that is killing traffic referrals from web platforms to news outlets, as the graph below indicates.

So what next?

There is already litigation over ingestion that will end up in the US Supreme Court and maybe our’s too. The Trump administration has lined up in support the ingesters. The Carney government is sitting on the fence.

His MPs on the Finance committee are recommending he get off of it.

finarp04-e Download

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Support for the Online Streaming Act is up – the story of Global News – California waits for Governor to sign a QCJO bill

September 12, 2026

A new Nanos poll commissioned by Bloomberg News finds increased support for public policy requiring US streamers to contribute financially to Canadian content.

Support rose from 67% to 73% since Nanos last tested the waters four years ago while the Online Streaming Act was being debated in Parliament.

Detailed results from the new poll have not been released other than Bloomberg reporting them in a news story. Assuming it’s the same question as the May 2022 poll, respondents were asked whether they believe US streamers should contribute financially to the creation of Canadian content “in the same way” as Canadian broadcasters.

As an indicator of the intensity of that support in 2022, the 67% yes vote was divided between “support” (39%) and “somewhat support” (28%). Eleven per cent were unsure. Until we get a peek at the full Nanos report, it’s unknown how much those numbers have changed. (Update 14/8/26: the full report shows increased intensity of “support” (48%) and “somewhat support” (25%). The “unsures” are down to 9%).

In any event the new 73% number is a jab in the ribs to Prime Minister Mark Carney who allowed US trade pressure to push him in the opposite direction. In June the Prime Minister overturned the CRTC’s order that the streamers contribute 6.5% of revenues in cash to media financing funds and another 8.5% to their own investments in Canadian shows. Domestic broadcasters contribute a total of 25% of revenues to Canadian content.

The Carney government is now deliberating its guidance to the CRTC on a new framework for streamer contributions. Even prior to Carney’s intervention, the text of the Online Streaming Act and the CRTC’s implementation of it expected less of foreign streamers than Canadian broadcasters.

At the time of their intervention, Carney and cultural and identity minister Marc Miller claimed that overruling the CRTC wasn’t a response to US trade pressure but rather their sensitivity to subscription pricing.

On that note, the Hollywood Reporter has published a sassy story about escalating streaming subscription prices in the US where streamers have been steadily raising prices well above the rate of inflation. The content-lean Apple TV has tripled its price since launch in 2019. Netflix Premium is up 125% since 2013 (while inflation was 38% over that period of time).

***

For those that still admit to having ever met Justin Trudeau (I did, he’s tall!), you’ll be interested to know that the drama teacher has become a drama producer.

No wisecracking, ‘kay? The former PM is going into the independent movie making business with his old sidekick and chief of staff, Katie Telford. Nom de guerre of the new enterprise is Hope and Hard Work.

I will let his press release do the explaining.

***

Steve Faguy has written a well informed and balanced account of the gradual demise, possibly fatal, of Corus Entertainment and its Global News television subsidiary.

He sizes up the various culprits: the Shaw family’s restructuring of its various business divisions and debt loads, the CRTC’s astonishing lethargy, the federal government’s inaction, and Rogers’ cutthroat raid on Corus’ profitable US programming. Like the collective assassins of Julius Caesar, it’s hard to pin the crime on one suspect alone.

Now a penny stock loaded with debt, here’s hoping that Global can survive.

One point Faguy doesn’t make, and it could make all of the difference to Global’s survival, is that the federal government’s Online News Act injects $3.9M annually into the television network. If culture and identity minister Marc Miller follows through with his promise to extend “QCJO” journalist labour tax credits to broadcasters, that’s roughly another $8M.

In 2025, Global spent $119M on television news programming. According to Unifor, Global has laid off 173 union members since early 2024.

If the QCJO money materializes, it should be announced in the Fall budget.

***

It’s intriguing to follow Californian media policy from afar.

As the home turf of Big Tech and Hollywood, you might expect corporate interests to dictate public policy.

Not necessarily.

When five Democratic federal congress representatives from California joined House Republicans in condemning Canada’s Online Streaming Act, the remaining 47 congress representatives did not. Neither did the state’s two Senators.

At the state level, the legislature is Democrat-controlled from top to bottom and elected officials insist on lobbing hot potatoes in the lap of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Over the course of twenty-four months culminating this August, Newsom endorsed, gutted and then revived the state Assembly’s modest Californian knock-off of Canada’s Online News Act, based on matching $20 million contributions from Google and the state.

Now the legislature has overwhelmingly passed AB2222, the Community News Act. The Canadian policy analogy would be the federal labour tax credit on journalist salaries. Newsom has until the end of the month to sign it, or it dies.

The Community News Act tracks our QCJO labour tax credit for hiring and retaining journalists. The dollar amounts are comparable: $20,000 (USD) per head for the first five journalists and $15,000 thereafter. Any new hires that grow the size of the newsroom are supported at $35,000 per salary.

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

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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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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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

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Carney’s Fleecing – Honest Reporting’s tax troubles – what CRTC chairs do – huzzah Canada!

July 5, 2026

Of the gamut of emotions that supporters of the Online Streaming Act ran through when Prime Minister Mark Carney overruled the CRTC’s 15% contribution scheme for Netflix and the foreign streamers, the most gut wrenching was betrayal.

Who could forget only 125 days earlier Carney horsing around with Hudson Williams at the CMPA Prime Time conference, donning the iconic Team Canada fleece jacket from the TV series Heated Rivalry? The smash cultural hit was a demonstration of Canada’s “soft power,” said the PM, as he snuggled deeper into the jacket.

In my high school days, wearing the football team jacket was the prerogative accorded to the girlfriends of the young men on the championship team, showing up to class on a daily basis sporting the team colours.

Well, Carney’s bromance with film producers is over. Or at least they are very seriously taking some time apart. So there’s the problem of the jacket, you see.

Marie Woolf has a delightful story in the Globe & Mail reporting that the executive producer of Heated Rivalry, Brendan Brady, is taking back the fleece (or more precisely, putting on hold his promise to send it to Carney).

Said Brady, “We actually have one of those fleeces on hold for him that we want to send to him. But obviously I think we’re waiting to see how this goes and making sure that everything gets cleared up for the Online Streaming Act to be enacted for real for us, so we might just be holding off on that.

“If we’re on pause with the government, then the fleece is on pause until we know.”

Alternatively, Brady could raffle it off.

***

The Investigative Journalism Foundation published a story last week on the tax troubles of Honest Reporting Canada (HRC).

HRC is a media watchdog that appears to have two main functions: the first to stridently criticize by-lined journalists whose news stories it considers treat Israel unfairly.

The other is to offer journalist-facing content to educate reporters about controversial assumptions often made about the Israeli-Arab conflict without sufficient historical depth or geographic breadth.

The tax trouble is that as of a year ago the Canada Revenue Agency has been seeking to revoke the charitable status (“as a qualified donee”) of a related organization, Honest Reporting Canada Charitable Organization (HRCCO) on the grounds that it does not engage in any of the tax code’s short list of charitable activities.

Examples of the CRA’s approved spending on charitable objects include the relief of poverty or the advancement of education.

Also, the CRA told HRCCO that from the audit it performed HRCCO appears to be diverting charitable donations to pay the expenses of the media website, Honest Reporting Canada, which is not a registered charity.

The tax dispute is headed to the Federal Court of Appeal and in the meantime HRCCO has stopped accepting donations and the CRA has paused deregistration.

Honest Reporting Canada’s publishing generally does not include original news, which explains why it could not obtain “qualified donee” status directly under the federal government’s QCJO program of news subsidies. Probably for a similar reason, HRC is not eligible for Google journalism funds under the Online News Act.

The QCJO program allows non profit journalism organizations to become “qualified donees” of public donations, as an expansion beyond traditional tax parameters limited to education or the relief of poverty.

In general, US charity tax laws are more hospitable to public interest journalism than the Canadian tax code.

Meanwhile charities are free under Canadian law to engage in public policy dialogue and development activities connected to the legal purpose of the charity as long as they are not directly or indirectly partisan. Previously no more than 10% of donations were permitted to support political advocacy.

***

It’s not every day you ask yourself, “what would Konrad von Finckenstein do?”

In February 2011 the one-term CRTC chair (2007-2012) made a ruling he thought was good public policy —-allowing ISP providers to charge more to heavy consumers of data —only to be publicly slapped down by the Harper government that had appointed him.

Von Finckenstein was outspokenly defiant in response to the government’s public rebuke although in the end his Commission came up with a compromise. He was not reappointed when his term expired a year later.

In a recent appearance on Michael Geist’s half-hour podcast, Mark Musselman is unsparingly candid about the current CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides meekly submitting to her now diminished independence on implementing the Online Streaming Act.

Musselman has the gift of the explanatory gab and calls it as he sees it (and his narrative just happens to line up with the MediaPolicy’s posts on this topic). We part company at about the 27th minute when he describes the current federal policy on supporting film and television as outdated and in need of something new.

Still, the podcast is well worth your time.

***

If this was a blog site devoted to American media policy, not Canadian, we could spend a lot of time tracking the never ending mergers and corporate somersaults that feature south of the border.

Here are a few in the recent past:

TikTok spun off its American operations with Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison taking control.
Ellison is the money behind Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers Discovery, leaving Netflix as the jilted suitor flush with an unspent dowry.
The Murdoch family’s Fox Entertainment has bought Roku, combining Fox’s content empire with Roku’s extensive home distribution network.

The latest is that Comcast is spinning off its content division, NBC Universal, into a separate company.

This is seen as an acknowledgement of the fading benefits of combining NBC Universal content with Comcast cable distribution, despite Comcast going out of its way to buy NBC in 2011.

Comcast shares bounced up following the announcement that it was cutting NBC Universal loose. More long term, the plan is for Comcast to focus its efforts and its capital on competing with other cable and fixed wireless distribution networks and to free itself of the less predictable media business.

The new NBC Universal would arguably be in a better position to make deals with other distributors not named Comcast. But the sleeper in this new arrangement may be that it becomes a takeover target for Netflix.

Meanwhile, the 900 pound gorilla YouTube has asked that its sleep not be disturbed.

***

I cannot sign off this week without stating my admiration of the Canadian men’s national soccer team.

If you watched their 3-0 exit —not reflective of the balance of play—-from the World Cup against a superior team from Morocco, you would have witnessed a special cultural moment of Canadian self belief, ambition, and a brotherhood of young men utterly unafraid of the odds.

Instead of doing the classic underdog routine of turtling in a defensive shell and playing 120 minutes for a penalty shoot out, the Canadians went for the jugular from the opening whistle. They were the better team for most of the game.

Other than the injured Alphonso Davies, there are no world class stars on this team. Yet they played as if it was the ghost of Admiral Horatio Nelson whispering in their ears, “ne’er mind the maneuvers lads, always go straight at ‘em.”

Huzzah.

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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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