Interrupting my July vacation to highlight some points regarding Meta and Google’s high-stakes game of chicken with the Canadian government over Bill C-18.

1. This is not about money. It’s about power. I see that Michael Geist is arguing that Meta’s and Google’s decision to remove Canadian news providers is based on economic considerations, that “news links” (what most people just call “news”) isn’t economically valuable enough to justify them allowing Canadian news services on their networks. And similarly, that “economic circumstances” have changed, and these companies don’t have as much ready cash as they did in the good ol’ days.

The tell that Google and Meta’s actions aren’t being driven by economic considerations is that Google has run this play before. Not in Australia, but in Spain, which Google News abandoned in 2014, when the government passed a law requiring news aggregators to pay a licensing fee for posting headline snippets. They only returned last year, following a modification of the law, which allows … wait for it … “media outlets to negotiate directly with the tech giant.”

Google and Meta aren’t objecting to the price, or a free and open internet. They simply don’t want to be told what to do.

This is a fight over structural power, and who gets to exercise it: tech macrointermediaries (a more accurate term than “platform”) or democratically elected governments. The term “structural power” – which refers to the ability to set the rules and norms under which others operate – doesn’t show up in these debates very often, but it’s key to understanding these clashes between platforms and governments.

And this isn’t just any fight over structural power. As the foundational International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange recognized, the power to control the legitimation, creation, dissemination and use of knowledge is a fundamental form of power in society. In other words, this is a fight about the very principle that sovereign, democratically elected governments have the legitimate right to pass and enforce laws regulating activities within their territory.

In a nutshell, Google and Meta – two unaccountable, foreign monopolies – want to retain for themselves the right to determine what Canadians are able to access over their (monopolistic) networks. In an interview with Jesse Brown, Google gave a nice example of what this structural power looks like when wielded by Google, with Google head of communication Lauren Skelly noting that they would be blocking Canadian sites based not on whether a company had registered with the CRTC, but on “Google’s own determination.”

This should be old hat by now, but it bears repeating: This is what platforms/macrointermediaries do. They set rules governing our actions. All else being equal, they will go along with things (voluntary codes of conduct, captive oversight boards) that don’t challenge their structural power, and resist any attempts by governments to adopt rules that they don’t agree with.

That this is a battle for structural power also clarifies that regardless of the pros and cons of Bill C-18 or any imagined alternative, these companies would have actively resisted pretty much any Canadian legislation that directly challenged their business model, which is based on low/no-cost access to material produced by others. Lots of people have been calling for effective regulation of platforms/macrointermediaries; that is, regulation that changes their behaviour. Any effective regulation would have triggered this type of tantrum.

2. “Value” is a two-way street. One of the ways to see Bill C-18 is as a long-needed corrective to the idea that openness itself is an unmitigated good, rather than as a two- or many-sided relationship in which all parties contribute something necessary for the creation of social value. The idea of a “link tax” as a pejorative captures the dynamics of the “unmitigated good” position: not only that the companies shouldn’t have to pay for linking to material they didn’t create, but that such a tax would serve as an unjustifiable restriction on the spread of knowledge. (Not true: As Paris Marx has noted, requirements elsewhere that search engines pay for use has failed to “break the internet.”)

While perhaps defensible in the early 2000s, the spread of misinformation and hate speech has shown the unmitigated good position to be near-sighted and naïve, while the collapse of the journalism industry serves as a reminder that the quality of content matters as much as the ability to share content. By requiring a form of revenue sharing between macrointermediaries and essential information sources, Bill C-18 can be seen as an attempt to recognize the two-way nature of the information-creation and -dissemination relationship.

(To be clear, Bill C-18 does not enact a tax (a word that has a specific meaning) on links. The use of the phrase “link tax” by people in this debate is wholly polemical and, IMO, should be avoided by those interested in serious debate.)

3. Before you judge the law too harshly, think through the politics. Even those who support the idea of government regulation have complained that Bill C-18 is a sop to Canada’s other media monopolists that misses a lot at the heart of the crisis in Canadian media. Which, fair enough. (Dwayne Winseck’s analysis of the pros and cons of the bill holds up pretty well even after a year.)

But then I started thinking about why the government may have chosen this approach rather than either a wholesale reform of the broader media sector or more fundamental regulation challenging the macrointermediary for-profit business model that lies at the heart of the problem. (Granted, this is a government that does not explain well even its good ideas, so I’m inferring here.) And when you think through the politics of the situation, Bill C-18 makes a lot more sense; i.e., it’s not a completely bananaheaded law.

First off, tackling foreign macrointermediaries/platforms (in C-11, C-18 and the upcoming online harms legislation) and Canada’s homegrown media monopolies would be like fighting a war on two fronts. To suggest it is to immediately see its folly.

Second, and related, the reality is that controversial legislation needs allies. Rupert Murdoch and his poisonous empire rightly deserve all our scorn. But the reality is, Australia’s legislation doesn’t get anywhere without the backing of a powerful lobby, which in their case was Murdoch. In Canada, it’s the large media companies. Communication and law professors may have right, and an armada of Twitter followers, on their side, but that’s not nearly enough to push through an ambitious policy agenda. You go to policy war with the allies you have.

Third, Canada, like Australia, is a small player. One of the lessons of Natasha Tusikov’s invaluable book, Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet, is that the power to shape the actions of these large macrointermediaries is largely the purview of the biggest states, namely the United States and the European Union. The European Union’s market power allows it to reshape these companies’ activities — that is, they can exert structural power over Meta and Google.

Not so smaller countries. I’m not sure that Canada or Australia could pull off more than they have here. And that they’re even trying to hold these titans accountable is laudable enough that we should try to understand their logic, even if in the case of Canada (as noted), they may not be as forthcoming as they should be.

If negotiating a multi-million-dollar payment among media players is anathema to these companies, imagine their reaction if Canada, or Australia, had tried to, as Cory Doctorow recommends, crack down on the surveillance-based advertising that is their lifeblood. I 100% agree this needs to happen, and even that it would be worth the sacrifice. But there’s no world in which it wouldn’t trigger a nuclear reaction from our macrointermediary overlords.

The best should not be the enemy of the good. These companies need to be subject to democratic domestic regulation. A plan that leaves platform power relatively intact while leaving it to private actors to negotiate payments? I totally get it. Does it solve all our problems? No. Did it do enough? Not at all — Paris Marx has a nice rundown of things that the government should also be doing, while Winseck’s piece, cited above, lays out a policy agenda I find hard to disagree with. But: it gets some money to media companies while trying not to pick too big a fight. In other words, it wasn’t a crazy idea, no matter what the Monday-morning quarterbacks are saying.

4. Remember net neutrality? I’m still waiting for someone to stand up for the principle that online service providers should not discriminate against different types of content. To wit: following the principle of net neutrality, it should be illegal for search engines and social media platforms to discriminate against Canadian news providers. This should be part of the government’s next move, in Sandy Garossino’s words, to “Hit. Them. Harder.” This is about structural power. Canada needs to ensure the health of its information ecosystem: this is an existential requirement. Right now, Meta and Google are threatening its health.

5. This is just a preview of what’s to come. I still find it hard to believe that these companies, and their hangers-on, are fighting so hard against what are, in the big picture, very minor pieces of legislation. Countries need a healthy information ecosystem to survive: that content-dissemination companies, whose own behaviours have been degrading said ecosystem, should pay to support that should be a no-brainer. Ditto payments to support Canadian culture, which have been a normal part of Canadian society for decades.

As for the fear-mongering over requiring these companies to promote Canadian culture in their search results? Pass me my smelling salts! I’d be a lot more concerned if these companies didn’t already shape their search and recommendation algorithms to suit their own commercial interests, and if the government were asking for anything more than what has been common practice, again, for decades.

The real fight is still on the horizon. The regulation of online harms is going to be bruising. And while it touches any number of third rails, especially free expression, thinking about it as a contest over structural power – whether democratic governments or unaccountable foreign corporations should set the rules under which we live – can help clarify things.

As Facebook and Google’s attempts to hold Canadian media and Canadians hostage against the Canadian government show, these companies already – and vengefully – restrict freedom of expression on their platform. The question before us isn’t, should expression be restricted online? It already and always is. And even the question of what the rules should be is, in a sense, secondary to the larger issue of, who should be allowed to set them, and with what degree of accountability? From where I sit, the Canadian government is a hell of a lot more accountable, and responsible, than these two would-be information monopolists.

That’s enough for me. I’m going to write a post for the release of our book (out next week! DO NOT BUY THE EBOOK – it’ll be available as an Open Access publication), but other than that I’ll see y’all in a couple of months. Don’t drop any heavy legislation while I’m AFK.

Here’s a picture of Niagara Falls, which isn’t a metaphor for anything. It’s just pretty, and pretty majestic.