Thank you, Kent.
Thank you, Chair. My name is Richard Gingras. I am Google’s vice-president for news. Fifteen years ago I served as publisher of Salon.com, the web’s first digital news offering. I have some appreciation for the evolving market conditions facing publishers.
For over a decade I’ve worked with journalists and publishers around the world to advance quality journalism. We collaborate closely with the journalism community. We’ve trained half a million journalists on subjects ranging from journalist security to audience development. We’ve developed tools to help drive subscriptions. We offer free tools to help journalists with investigative work. We’ve created funds to drive innovation around the world. Recently we announced a multi-year fund in Taiwan called the “digital co-prosperity fund” crafted with stakeholders across the spectrum, governed by outsiders and with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs.
I have also worked closely with dozens of newsrooms and publishers across Canada, including both long-standing legacy publishers and emerging digital players. Canada has the most innovative digital news ecosystem in the world, from the award-winning efforts of The Globe and Mail to start-ups like Discourse Media and The Narwhal, to the remarkable profitability of Village Media’s network of local news sites in more than 100 communities across Canada.
We and many others are concerned with the impact of Bill C-18 on the evolution of journalism in open societies. It would make it more difficult for digitally innovative, entrepreneurial journalists and publishers to help Canadians understand important issues in their communities.
Bill C-18 would make Canada the first country in the world to put a price on free links to web pages, setting a dangerous precedent that is contrary to the long-term interests of both Canadian readers and Canada’s independent press.
Last year we sent more than 3.6 billion visits to Canadian news publishers, helping grow their audiences and make money through ads and subscriptions. This referral traffic was valued at $250 million last year alone.
Putting a price on links, as Bill C-18 does, will naturally cause any company to reconsider how they use them. Take Google News, for example, which is a specialized aggregator and search service that I expect many of you are familiar with. It was created to help users discover multiple stories on diverse topics and from many sources.
Please understand that Google News, like Google Search, does not distribute articles from news publications. We provide only a link and a short snippet of text, often only the headline. Google News, like Google Search, is a newsstand that publishers don’t pay to be on, quite different from the prior world of print. We send millions of visitors to their sites for free. Google News costs us millions to operate, yet it delivers zero revenue. If we had to pay publishers simply for linking to their sites, making us lose money with every click, it would be reasonable for us or for any business to reconsider why we would continue to do so.
Bill C-18 would subsidize large legacy organizations and broadcasters to a far greater extent than it would smaller, emerging and innovative organizations that provide quality local news to communities, placing them at a comparative disadvantage. It would incentivize the creation of clickbait content over high-quality local journalism and likely require Google to pay publishers for non-factual or misleading content.
If Bill C-18 is passed in its current form, it may affect our ability to provide products and services that Canadians use and enjoy every day. To understand that impact and our options, we ran tests based on the current wording of the bill. Those tests limited the number of news links for 3.3% of Canadian users, selected at random, for five weeks.
Many of you have questions about these tests. I hope to provide more clarity on what they involved and why we ran them. We are committed to enabling a sustainable future for news in Canada, but this bill threatens to create a situation in which everybody loses. We want to work together to ensure that doesn't happen.
We welcome your questions and look forward to continuing our engagement.
Thank you.