Despite more than six years of Silicon Valley favoritism towards the establishment media, including censorship of its competition and artificial promotion in algorithms, liberal-globalist regimes want Big Tech to do more to protect Big Media from competition. The latest country to take action in this area is Canada.
The proposed Online News Act would force tech giants to make commercial deals with Canadian news publishers. Failure to come to terms with the publishers voluntarily would result in the tech companies facing a binding negotiation and arbitration process overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
The attempt of Canadian politicians to bail out the discredited establishment media via a shakedown of Silicon Valley is the latest in a worldwide effort by corporate media companies to shore up their position in the face of online competition.
Few things have threatened the establishment media’s monopoly over public attention like the rise of the internet. Creators on YouTube, sometimes with no resources but webcams and smartphones, today have audiences that eclipse cable news hosts. Authors on Substack and other subscription newsletters can make more money that top columnists at the New York Times.
To answer this challenge, establishment media companies are scrambling their lobbyists across multiple countries to protect themselves from their new competitors. Despite their considerable wealth and influence, the establishment media does not want to compete on an even playing field against independent creators and journalists.
In the United States, these efforts have led to the proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a Democrat-led effort that would allow the biggest media companies in the U.S. to join forces in a cartel.
Multiple Republican legislators including GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have all denounced the JCPA, warning that it is a handout to discredited media companies that also deepens their collusion with Big Tech.
Experts including FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, President Trump’s Big Tech expert Prof. Adam Candeub, and former federal antitrust enforcer Dr. Daniel Francis have all warned that the legislation is misguided.
Despite this, media lobbyists in the U.S. continue to press for the legislation, recently adding sham amendments to make the bill more palatable to lawmakers.
In Australia, a lobbying effort led by News Corp successfully persuaded the “conservative” government there to pass a law similar to the one proposed in Canada, which forces tech companies to pay already-wealthy media giants for the privilege of promoting their content.
Facebook engaged in a brief act of defiance against the Australian government, temporarily blocking access to news content for the country’s users in protest at the legislation, but eventually relented. The company also caved in to pressure in the United Kingdom, where the tech giant is voluntarily handing out millions of dollars to prop up the establishment media.
Media industry lobbyists point to the closure of local news outlets to justify shaking down the tech companies, but simply looking at the number of closures does not tell the full story. As the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor pointed out at a recent hearing on the JCPA, the same national media companies that benefit from the proposed media protection laws bear much of the blame for those shutdowns, due to their tactic of buying up small competitors and either closing them or rolling them into their national brands.
Even if big media companies were at serious risk due to online competition, the public would not necessarily support a bailout. Polling consistently shows that a large majority of people in both Canada and the U.S. no longer trust traditional sources of media.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.