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The
Online News Act, introduced in April, laid out rules to force
platforms like Meta's Facebook and Alphabet's Google to
negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their
content, in a move similar to a ground-breaking law passed in
Australia last year.
The legislation is under consideration at a parliamentary
committee, to which the U.S. social media company said it has
not been invited to share its concerns.
"We believe the Online News Act misrepresents the relationship
between platforms and news publishers, and we call on the
government to review its approach," Marc Dinsdale, head of media
partnerships at Meta Canada, said in a blog post.
"In the face of adverse legislation based on false assumptions
that defy the logic of how Facebook operates, we believe it's
important to be transparent about the possibility that we may be
forced to reconsider allowing news content sharing in Canada,"
Dinsdale wrote.
Canada's Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who introduced the
bill, said in a statement on Friday that the government
continued to have "constructive conversations" with Facebook.
"All we're asking the tech giants like Facebook to do is
negotiate fair deals with news outlets when they profit from
their work," Rodriguez said in an emailed statement.
The legislation proposes that digital platforms that have a
"bargaining imbalance" with news businesses - measured by
metrics like a firm's global revenue - must make fair deals that
would then be assessed by a regulator.
Dinsdale said news content was not a draw for Facebook users and
did not bring significant revenue to the company.
When Australia, which has led global efforts to rein in the
powers of tech firms, proposed legislation forcing them to pay
local media for news content, Google threatened to close its
Australian search engine, while Facebook cut all third-party
content from Australian accounts for more than a week.
Both eventually struck deals with Australian media companies
after a series of amendments to the legislation were offered.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa, Editing by Rosalba
O'Brien)
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