New White Paper Examines the Effectiveness of Canada’s Online News Act
January 29, 2025
In 2023, the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, a policy response to the financial challenges facing legacy media companies. The Act aimed to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace, support press independence, and promote diversity among news outlets by requiring that large digital platforms (such as Meta and Google) compensate news publishers for news content made available on their platforms. However, concerns soon arose that the Act failed to meet its objectives and inadvertently introduced potential difficulties into the news ecosystem.
Academic affiliate Maxime Cohen authored a white paper, with support from Meta, to evaluate the effectiveness of the Online News Act. In the white paper, Professor Cohen notes that despite well-intentioned motivations, the Act has not addressed the consequences of the primary core business dynamic facing news publishers: decreased advertising revenue in the face of increased competition for advertisers from digital platforms. He also discusses various problems the Act may pose, including hindering publishers’ ability to utilize Meta as a strategic complement, assigning to Meta the responsibility to determine what constitutes Canadian news, and distorting competition among digital platforms by altering their growth incentives.