Shields wants Canada to support local newspapers over tech giants

By Cole Parkinson
Local Journalism Initative
news@tabertimes.com

With tech giants such as Google and Facebook having such a large presence in the digital landscape, most people end up receiving their news from these tech giants. With this state of affairs, they were able to create a parasitic relationship with local newspapers.

They are able to use stories from hundreds of different papers in exchange for the revenue they make from advertisements. This results in tech giants getting to take home the majority of revenue from advertisements ware as the local newspapers half to split the remaining revenue between all of themselves. The Canadian Government is trying to resolve this issue with Bill C-18.

“That’s a piece of legislation with a whole lot of parts in it,” said Bow River MP Martin Shields. “One is working at fair remuneration to media and I think that there is a place where we need to talk about remuneration. I think in the last piece of legislation, in its format, there was some discussion of that and they have been some other countries that have come to some kind of arrangement for revenue generation to a particular media.”

Shields also touched on some issues with the bill that he sees.

“There’s more problems with this piece of legislation though. When they start talking about bureaucrats deciding which parts of social media should be promoted and watched versus others — also in the sense of bureaucrats deciding whether to censor the people who do the censorship. There is a whole range of issues and I think the government has now stepped back a bit and are taking a look. I think they now established a committee to review some of it outside of the legislation before they bring it back and talk about it more.”

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