Murphy's Logic: Bill C-18's unintended consequences

Quite often, solving one problem creates another.

It’s the law of unintended consequences.

So it is with the federal government’s attempt to provide support to the canadian news business through Bill C-18, the online news act.

The premise is that digital giants like facebook and google, should have to compensate news outlets, like CTV, for using their content, in the same way radio stations have to pay artists, writers and producers to use the music they create.

News is not free. It only seems fair that people should be paid for their work.

Predictably, the big companies don’t want to pay, so they're blocking local news from their platforms, where many Canadians go to find the real news.

One unintended consequence of Bill C-18 may be that financially struggling news outlets — large and small — will lose all of the traffic that comes from facebook and google, reducing the value of their online advertising. That defeats the stated purpose of the law, which is to help news outlets make money.

Another is that if all the real journalism is deleted from those platforms, what’s left? The last thing any of us should want is to make even more room for nonsense and lies… even if it’s free.

In its present form, Bill C-18 doesn’t seem to be the right solution to the problems facing the news business.