Forced To Pay Royalties To Publishers In Canada, Facebook Plans To Block News Content

JAKARTA - Facebook issued a warning on Friday, October 21 that its subsidiary Meta Platform Inc. this, can block the sharing of news content on its platform in Canada. This was done because of concerns about laws that would force digital platforms to pay news publishers.

The Online News Act, introduced last April in Canada, has laid out rules to force social media platforms like Alphabet's Facebook and Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content. This is a similar move taken by the Australian government last year.

The legislation is being considered in a parliamentary committee, where the US social media company said it had not been invited to raise concerns.

"We believe the Online News Act misrepresents the relationship between platforms and news publishers, and we ask 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 is important to be transparent about the possibility that we may be forced to reconsider allowing the sharing of news content in Canada," Dinsdale wrote.

Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who introduced the bill, said in a statement on Friday that the government was continuing to have "constructive conversations" with Facebook.

"All we ask 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 law also proposes that digital platforms that have a "bargaining imbalance" with news businesses, measured by metrics such as a company's global revenue, should make fair deals which regulators will then assess.

While Dinsdale also said the news content is actually not attractive to Facebook users and does not bring significant revenue for their company.

When Australia, which has been leading a global effort to rein in the power of tech companies, proposed laws forcing them to pay local media outlets for news content, Google threatened to shut down search engines in Australia. Meanwhile, Facebook cut all third-party content from Australian accounts for more than a week.

The two eventually reached an agreement with an Australian media company after a series of proposed amendments to the law.