Canada’s competition bureau is closely following a French regulator’s ruling that Google must work out new arrangements to pay publishers and news agencies whose content is featured on its site.

But experts in copyright law and digital media don’t expect Canada to follow suit — at least not any time soon.

The Autorité de la concurrence, France’s competition bureau, ruled last week that Google must negotiate a repayment agreement with news companies and publishers for using their content.

The ruling stems from a November 2019 complaint from two unions representing press publishers and a French-headquartered news agency, that claimed Google displayed their content unfairly in snippets on its service, costing them important revenue.

“The Competition Bureau is aware of this decision … (but) regarding the conduct in question, it would be inappropriate for the bureau to speculate as to whether it may represent a contravention of (Canadian law),” Marcus Callaghan, a spokesperson for the Canadian regulator, said in a statement Monday.

“The bureau must conduct a thorough and complete examination of the facts before deciding whether to challenge any type of alleged conduct.”

According to the complainants, search engines — largely Google — represent between 26 per cent and 90 per cent of their redirected traffic. Google’s display policy meant publishers had to allow Google to display article extracts, photos and more without compensation — otherwise they wouldn’t be displayed at all.

This meant publishers and news agencies had no choice but to comply with Google’s display policies because they would otherwise lose income in a sector already facing a bleak economic outlook, the French regulator ruled.

Google’s actions amounted to “an abuse of a dominant position, and caused serious and immediate harm to the press sector,” according to the regulators’ statement. Google must now negotiate a new arrangement with French publishers within three months to repay them for “reuse of their protected contents,” including retroactive payments dating to Oct. 24, 2019.

Dwayne Winseck, a professor at Carleton University’s school of journalism and communication, said Google’s past approach — giving media companies the choice between displaying their content for free, or losing traffic through Google’s powerful service — amounted to “no choice at all.”

“That’s an imposition (Google has) been able to make on the base of its market power. So I see the (Autorité de la concurrence) decision as a counter to that,” Winseck said in an interview Monday.

Winseck said he doesn’t expect Canadian regulators to come to a similar conclusion in the short term. But he said they’re at least aware of the problem, pointing to the findings of a government-commissioned independent review into Canada’s media and communications environment released in January.

That review panel — chaired by industry veteran Janet Yale — recommended a new regulatory system to govern the relationship between big tech companies and “content producers.”

“Canadians are increasingly accessing news online through social media platforms, which facilitate the sharing of content … without any form of compensation to the journalists and media outlets that created the content,” the report reads.

“The problem is exacerbated by the imbalance in negotiating power between the dominant social media platforms and the great number of creators who actually produce the news.”

But Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor and leading researcher on internet and e-commerce issues, said the French regulators’ ruling could establish a system where Google and other internet platforms must pay publishers — even if they don’t use that publisher’s content on their sites.

“I think (the decision) raises some concerns about essentially deep government interference in a marketplace, when I think there are other approaches that could be used (to support publishers),” Geist said in an interview.

“We’ve seen the (Canadian) government come up with a number of plans and support mechanisms for the media sector. Whether that is sufficient or not I know is open to debate, but nevertheless they’ve acted in this way.”

According to the 2017 report from the Public Policy Forum, “The Shattered Mirror,” Canadians are accessing news stories more and more through aggregators such as Google News, Facebook and Twitter — and not the media organizations themselves.

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Google and Facebook, in particular, now enjoy “unprecedented power over distribution of the web’s content fragments, including news,” the report stated. This means they get the bulk of the ad revenue — two out of every three digital ad dollars spent in Canada — not the news sites.

The report said sites like Google exploit the content of news organization in a system they called “vampire economics” — siphoning revenue from the organizations, while using their content on news feeds and search results.

In a statement, Google said it would comply with the French regulator’s orders, and told Reuters the company has been “engaging with publishers” since new European copyright laws came into force in France last year.

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