Canadian Heritage Committee on April 20th, 2023

[Richard Gingras]

Yes, that is correct. The Australian bargaining code does not apply to Google. We were not designated.

As to your question with regard to payment for links, it is true that Canada would be the first country to put a price on links. I would further note that the European Union went through an extensive and, I thought, thoughtful review of copyright in the digital age and reaffirmed the right to a search engine and others rights, such as the use of a link and a short extract of text.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

The Supreme Court in Canada also confirmed that there shouldn't be a price on links, but I want to talk about the compensation that may happen as a result.

You have contracts with individuals, and there's a cost to sharing a link, so when the government asks you to take down a post, which, according to the evidence that we heard earlier, they have done, is there compensation of any kind going to anyone, that you're aware of, under the proposed model?

[Richard Gingras]

I am certainly not aware of anything of that sort.

I want to repeat that the contracts and relationships we have with publishers are not specifically tied to individual links or a quantity of links or the ranking of links.

[Kent Walker]

I would just add that this is one of the reasons we believe a fund model similar to what was adopted in Taiwan is a more durable, sustainable approach to news, because it doesn't incent improper behaviour, various websites putting up more clickbait content or extremist websites trying to be subsidized as part of this. You would have a framework in which you'd have clear journalistic standards, as you already do in the Canada Media Fund, that would promote the current system that so far, we believe, has been beneficial for Canadians and beneficial for Canadian publishers.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Just to confirm, in that deal with Taiwan, I think Google is giving, what, $250 million to the local media to keep them sustainable without any government interference. Is that correct?

[Richard Gingras]

No, that number for Taiwan is not correct. The $250 million that you refer to is what third parties have assessed as the overall value of our provision of 3.6 billion links—visits, I should say, to publishers in Canada, not the size of the Taiwan fund.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

Let's talk a little bit about the test that was done. The Parliamentary Budget Officer had looked at what he expected to happen under Bill C-18 and said that 75% of the revenue would likely go to CBC, Rogers and Bell Media based on their having the larger-volume news content. Did you see a similar result in your test?

[Richard Gingras]

We have not analyzed the results in that regard, so I really can't say one way or the other. Not surprisingly, I would say, obviously publishers who produce large volumes of content will likely see more traffic to that content.

When it comes to news at Google, be it on search or in Google News, we strive to present results sources that relate to news topics, whereas it is our analysis that under Bill C-18, the links and the size of the eligible news business class would mean that compensation would go to content that's far beyond what we would call news topics or current event coverage.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I'm running out of time.

I have one last question and it has to do with a concern that my chamber of commerce brought forward. They were very concerned to see that we were demanding to see internal documents for private business that is considering how to respond to government legislation. Do you have any concern about that?

[Kent Walker]

It is something that we have thought a lot about. It's one of the reasons we are trying to comply with the committee's order for information, but we also recognize the importance of being able to maintain democratic conversations with a variety of stakeholders while protecting privilege, trade secrets and other forms of confidentiality. I believe the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and others have raised these concerns. To our knowledge, it's somewhat unprecedented, but we are making a good-faith effort to comply to the best of our ability.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

Thank you, Ms. Gladu. You are right on time, actually.

The second round is about five minutes, and we'll go now to Ms. Hepfner.

Lisa, go ahead, please.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I would reiterate the thanks to our witnesses for being here with us today and for appreciating the importance of coming to speak to parliamentarians here in Canada.

First, I will be directing my questions to you, Mr. Walker, if you wouldn't mind answering.

We've touched on this topic already today in terms of the tests Google employed in Canada. A key question that I'm not quite sure we've heard an answer to is whether Google gives any individual user data to block users from accessing news sources. I guess the question is, please confirm whether user privacy was breached in any way while you rolled out these tests.

[Kent Walker]

I don't believe it was in any way. Other than the use of a randomly selected group of IP addresses, which some protection authorities would consider personal identifiable information, I don't believe there was any other form of user data that was used here.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Okay. That's fair enough. Thank you, Mr. Walker.

We've heard a lot about links today. You or a Google representative said that these tests were designed specifically to assess the potential impacts of Bill C-18 on how news is linked to Google Search and Google Discovery. We've heard this several times today. We heard this in previous testimony from Ms. Geremia when she appeared before our committee last month.

Please tell us how these tests could possibly be conclusive given that Google is moving away from traditional links in this search engine and instead towards AI features. We heard this from your CEO in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on April 6.

Please go ahead, Mr. Walker.

[Kent Walker]

I would say that Richard is absolutely the expert on these topics. I'm happy to undertake a high-level answer, but if you want details, he would be a more authoritative source. That said, I will give you my best answer to your question.

At a high level, I don't believe that we are moving away from links on the web. To the contrary, we believe that links to publisher content remain a very important contributor to being able to answer individuals' queries in different ways. It is also right that we are looking at different ways of complementing that experience through some of the new generative AI tools that we've been working on for some time and that others have brought to the market, but the linking experience continues to be an important part of a search on Google, and I would expect it would be for the foreseeable future.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Please expand on that, Mr. Walker. What does the future look like? Give us a picture of AI and what kind of impact that will play in terms of how we search on Google.

[Kent Walker]

We're very excited about the potential here, but we haven't landed on particular implementations yet. We are trying to harness the extraordinary creativity of generative AI models that allow you to create a poem or something—to respond to an email or whatever else it might be—and, in some cases, to summarize or distill content that's on the web, with the value of having a variety of content that people can go to directly.

You may have heard or read about the notion of AI hallucinations. In some cases, these generative AI models are predicting the next most likely word or words, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are grounded to underlying factual content, so a combination of those two tools turns out to be really quite important. One of the things we're looking to do is to understand how best to ground the models in a way that harnesses their powers of creativity and distillation but also draws on facts about the world.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Thank you. It's very interesting to hear this from you.

We've also heard this afternoon that Bill C-18 can help to spread misinformation and propaganda in Canada. However, from my perspective as a former journalist, I would say that during the test that's exactly what Google did in response to our legislation.

When Google ran similar tests in Australia, it blocked access to fact-based news sources and instead promoted sources of questionable quality that were known for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. Please confirm for us whether Google has promoted those sorts of sources in its tests in Canada.

[Kent Walker]

As Richard was saying, we try very hard to do quite the opposite. We want Google to be known as a source of high-quality information whenever possible. That's why when we implement these kinds of tests—and again, we do thousands of tests a year—we are constantly looking for the value to users in response to a whole variety of queries.

Our concern about Bill C-18, and the reason for the test, is that it may well encourage more low-quality information websites that are trying to—

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Thank you, sir. I think my time is up.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

It is up. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Walker.

We'll go to the Bloc and Mr. Champoux for two and a half minutes.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Since I only have two and half minutes, and interpretation takes a few seconds, I'm counting on your largesse and your generosity.

Mr. Walker or Mr. Gingras, my question is for either one of you.

In this week's news, you may have seen a subject that attracted a lot of attention here. I'm talking about the label of "government-funded media" that Twitter slapped onto the CBC, Canada's public broadcaster. As a result, it created an association, without saying so outright, with media propaganda like that in North Korea, China, Russia and so on. What did you think of it?

[Richard Gingras]

We think it's important to give our users an opportunity to find background information about the sources they might find in Google Search, for instance. However, we don't label them in that fashion. What you would see if you used Google Search is that next to every result is a small three-dot menu. From there, you can get further information about that result so you can make your own assessment—

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Gingras, I have very little time. As I was saying…