Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I'm going to start with Dr. Geist.
Dr. Geist, you may have seen some of my interventions here at committee on C-18, where I did start by pointing out to the then minister of heritage what had happened in Australia when Meta blocked news content. I asked him what actions he was going to take to make sure that didn't happen in Canada. He said it was a simple business decision.
When Meta and Google were here, I asked them whether, if C-18 was passed in its current form and if the government made them pay for people to share news links, it would be a reasonable business decision to decide not to do that because they would have to pay. They both said it was, so I was not surprised when this result happened, although the Liberals and NDP seemed to be shocked and surprised. It looks like it's had very negative impacts on small and local businesses, when the whole point of C-18 was to try to protect small, local news outlets.
Were you surprised? What do you think the impacts have been?