It's reasonably well known that I was quite critical of Bill C-18 or the Online News Act. Many of the concerns that were raised at that time have played out, with respect to the blocking of news links now for a couple of years, which hasn't entirely eliminated the existence of news on those Meta platforms. It has eliminated much of the quality news. We've seen substitutable content that has undermined the reliability of it and diminished the amount of news because, quite frankly, people are happy not to view that news. It has ultimately hurt many of the news organizations that were beneficiaries of the referral traffic and the like that was coming from that platform.
Even more, I think Bill C-18 has also had the effect of undermining the independence of many media outlets. We've now seen some outlets that previously were opposed to taking the Google money now saying they can't effectively compete if they don't take the Google money when their direct competitors are.
We've created a system where the vast majority of organizations are now increasingly dependent on regulatory models that result in these kinds of payments. I don't think that is a healthy place to be with respect to where we're at.
I referenced that in my opening remarks because it seems to me that one of the risks we face is if we adopt an approach that increases the costs.... Basically, if we say that the only way you can include certain Canadian content in a large language model is if you meet these new regulated costs, we're going to loop in some of these same players and we run the risk of running a replay on this all over again.
It's not that these companies are going to exit per se, although some might. The Quebec legislation that was just referenced—Bill 109, I think—very likely leads to the potential exit of certain streaming services, given some of the demands, especially in the context of AI. We have services that will basically say that if the choice is that they have to compensate in a manner that is inconsistent with what the business models and the global standards are or exclude their content, they're going to exclude the content.
That leads us to a place where many of the benefits we've heard about from this are lost. Even more, the concerns we have about the AI systems reflecting our culture and reflecting our interests may be lost.
You have to ensure that you are in the game, it seems to me. We face real risks if we make choices that lead some of these organizations to say that Canada is a market that isn't AI-friendly and they can't effectively compete in this space.
As I said, we've seen that play out with respect to Bill C-18. I don't think we'd want to see that play out again with respect to generative AI.