Steve Saretsky

What's notable about when we look at the numbers from the sector, it is always about how much has been invested and spent.

It's not about how much we're earning from this.

It's not about audiences or anything like that.

What gets measured is always how much is being invested in production.

And so if that's what you're measuring, that's what you're going to prioritize.

still see news on instagram canadian news okay so that is that that moves us to a different piece of legislation that's the online news act which was at the time bill c18 and they all didn't they all come out kind of the same time they came out pretty similar it was supposed to be three bills all together it was supposed to be the online streaming act the online news act and the online harms act

The Online Harms Act was one that came out a bit later.

Yeah, there were a few different heritage ministers.

Guilbeau was the one that kicked it off.

It then moved to Pablo Rodriguez for a time.

And then Pascal Saint-Ange was the minister that kind of took it over the finish line in a couple of cases.

And so, yeah, so that news bill was all about trying to get large platforms to pay money into traditional news outlets, primarily print, but also digital.

At the time, not broadcasters, although it seems now we might have the prospect of having broadcasters added to some of these systems.

And so the idea was...

You link to our content, you being certain large platforms, and so you ought to pay for the privilege of doing so.

The platform's response was, those links are really valuable to you.

We are driving traffic to your sites that generates new subscribers and ad revenue.

It's a pretty decent quid pro quo.

And the government was like, well, no, we still want to require this.

And they were, of course, being egged on by the media lobby to do so.