Evidence of meeting #148 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was google.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Mr. Kee, you're paying a few dollars to protect your business model. You're not paying it...and don't ever try to pass that off as being good citizens.
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We paid over $13 billion out to websites last year alone.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
You're paying it because you do not want to become a publisher. Are you ready to say here and now that you're ready to be a publisher, and call yourself a publisher, and be subject—
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We're not a publisher.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
I know you're not a publisher. I know you're very well protecting yourself that way, because the minute you become a publisher, all that money that you're stealing from everybody else you have to start paying for.
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
As I said, because we operate under a partnership model, where we're actually paying out to creators and we're paying out to these publishers—
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
And you have negotiated.... You are paying out, and which artists did you negotiate how much for their—
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We have thousands of music licence agreements in place with all the major collectives, record labels, etc., where we paid out over $6 billion to the music industry last year.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
You paid $6 billion, and you only made $8.5 billion a quarter.
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
That was through YouTube alone. That's not actually talking about our other services.
Liberal
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
That's in addition to the over $13 billion we paid out to publishers who are showing our ads. As we said, our fundamental model is a partnership model.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Are you telling me here and now that all these people have copyright, are happy...?
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
This is my last question.
Are you telling me you're such a good corporate citizen that if I talked to any of the musicians, the journalists, the photographers, the writers, the actors or the movie producers, they would say, “We're very satisfied with what Google and YouTube are paying us”? That's a yes-or-no question.
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We will continue to engage with them. We treat them as partners, and we'll do that.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Can you just say yes or no? Will they say, yes, they are happy, or no?
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We will continue to engage and we have a partnership with them.
Liberal
Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada
We have a partnership model with them.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
That brings us to the end of our questions.
Mr. Erskine-Smith, have you one last comment, or are we good? Okay.
Mr. Graham.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I want to make a comment on a separate topic, on something that Google did say, because it's not all bad.
I want to congratulate Google, because today you announced that all Chromebooks will be Linux-compatible out of the box starting soon. So not everything is negative. I'm very happy with some of the things you are doing. Thank you for that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Once again, Mr. McKay and Mr. Kee, thank you for coming. We look forward to your appearance and Google's appearance at the IGC. I hope the requests are taken seriously, as we've requested your CEO; we hope you're still considering that.
Thanks for coming today.
The meeting is adjourned.