The people who are doing the creativity and innovation right now don't think so, and I think that their perspectives are probably correct, because they are the folks doing that work.
From my perspective, this bill will reward organizations that have deal-making capacity and employ lawyers and business development people, and it will reward organizations that have lobbying power and presence in Ottawa, and the little organizations definitely don't have that. They spend all of their time trying to innovate their product and sort of tweak it so that people like it more and so that they are more likely to pay a subscription for it or sign up on Patreon or whatever model the organization is using.
One thing I can tell you as someone who has run news organizations is that the more business models you have, the more complicated your life is; the more masters you have to serve and the more expertise you have to develop. When I was running the Wikimedia Foundation, we experimented with multiple business models for two years and then we doubled down on the one that was working, which was ordinary people giving us donations because they wanted to.
It's not, I don't think, a great idea to try to get start-ups to be in the business of not just pleasing their audiences and aiming, presumably, for user pay in many circumstances but getting good at negotiating with Google and Facebook and coordinating with other entities to do that and also to get good at government through local journalism funds and whatever other mechanisms the government has. That's another stakeholder and another revenue generation area.
That is a lot of complexity for something that is really small when the person doing business development is also writing the news and maintaining the website.
I think it will be bad for innovation, and I think innovation is badly needed. What we want ideally is a sustainable journalism industry, and to get there, you have to innovate.