Réseau.Presse hopes for adoption of Australian-style bill regulating tech giants

”We have never had anything concrete. But now, Minister Rodriguez’ office is working on the bill, which is modeled from a similar bill adopted by the Australian government. It is a model based on royalties, taxation and impositions on web giants,” says Linda Lauzon, Director of Réseau.Presse. ”So Canada will use this formula, but will have to adapt it to our reality. The royalties collected by the Government of Canada, would then go to create a fund which our Canadian media could apply to, in order to compensate for the loss of income through advertising and the reuse of content.”

”We have so much diversity in Canada, just like in Australia. The sad truth is that in Australia, small newspapers are not that interesting for web giants. […] They don’t attract enough people, enough metadata, for companies like the Google and Facebook for example,” she says. ”What happened in Australia is that the model was separated in to two parts. On the one hand, there’s the model for the bigger newspapers, and on the other there was the smaller media. I use the same as in Australia, meaning an envelope has been set aside to meet the specific needs of small media.”