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So this is the alarming situation we face now. Google’s power and money are being deployed to promote views and sometimes even misinformation that benefit Google through a wide network of academics, lawyers and advocacy groups. Yet Google is an organization that does nothing so much as broker information. Is it wise or proper to allow any company to purchase its own terms for the integrity with which it treats others’ information?

Google’s interests with regard to its “digital rights” efforts are most neatly viewed through the activities of its YouTube arm. YouTube is the largest online distributor of music and other content, legitimate and pirated, but notoriously pays a pittance to the artists from whose work it benefits. Meanwhile, YouTube remains open for stream-ripping software that can pirate music directly from the site.

Google and other social media companies have grown fat and powerful under shelter provided by unjustly favourable laws. It now uses its power to try to enlarge that shelter rather than meeting the needs of the artists and creators on whose efforts its platform depends. (The latest favour from policy-makers to Big Tech was a provision in the new NAFTA deal that granted internet companies immunity from legal action on user-posted content; how did that get in there?)

At least now the tide is beginning to turn. Open Media’s efforts were defeated in Europe and legislators there said that they were particularly influenced by disgust at the tactics of the technology industry.

The University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist has attacked me for my criticisms of Open Media. He claims, without any basis, that I am a lobbyist for somebody or other. In fact, I am independent and I truly am only interested in representing the public interest.

Meanwhile, other groups out there are taking Google’s money while also claiming to represent the public interest. More and more decision-makers and legislators are starting to realize that it just isn’t possible to do both.

Richard C. Owens is a Toronto lawyer and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law