Canadian Heritage committee  I don't think PBS gets any special treatment under the bill. I think what happened is that the broadcasters sought and secured good-faith negotiations, but it ends there. I think they have some recourse if the counterparty is not acting in good faith, but there's no back-end binding arbitration that the newspaper coalition is going to enjoy.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think the small communities obviously did better as a coalition than they would have done had they negotiated individually. They did better. They actually secured money, and we get to see what they're doing with that money now. I'm going to stick with my thesis. They would have done even better had they been able to negotiate as a collective with all newspapers including the large ones.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I want to take on one thing that Ms. Gardner said just a second ago, which is this notion that the small organizations aren't going to have the resources to hire a lobbyist to negotiate. I just want to submit respectfully that the whole purpose of forming a coalition is that everyone goes in there together, represented by one lawyer, one expert.

Canadian Heritage committee  I haven't done a comparison of relative hiring, but what I do know, what has been widely reported, is that money that was collected by all newspapers, big and small, in Australia has been invested, ploughed back into the investment of journalists. That, to me, is the important takeaway.

Canadian Heritage committee  Of course. It leads to more journalism, more democracy, greater innovation—all good things.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, nothing would stifle innovation. If you can figure out a way to infuse newsrooms with new-found money, it should do the opposite. It should grow innovation, and it's going to do so by inducing them to invest in journalism.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, I think a funding formula is the best way. It's the most efficient way. I mean, the alternative is what I think Ms. Gardner was saying, that we should have taxpayers step in to fix the problem that's being caused by the platforms, and I respectfully disagree. If you can calculate the appropriation of value that news publishers are bringing to the table by the platforms, it ought to be incumbent on the platforms to pay that value, what would be paid in a fair market, voluntary transaction absent the power imbalance.

Canadian Heritage committee  Right. The question is what would be paid to the news publishers in a voluntary negotiation, absent the power imbalance, for access to their content so that Google and Facebook can do all the wonderful things that they do with the content today. What we can do to get at that question is see how much value is created on the platform by the news publishers, and we can go backwards in time and say if Google and Facebook would have had to pay for that in a voluntary negotiation, absent the power imbalance, what would they have paid.

Canadian Heritage committee  What I want to say first is that I'm a defender of big tech's freedom to engage in content moderation and particularly when it comes to keeping anti-Semitism or inflammatory violence.... Hopefully, we could agree that any comments that incite violence should be under the domain of the platform and they should have the free rights to restrict and to engage in content moderation.

Canadian Heritage committee  Looking at some kind of common denominator across the various types of conduct that's being challenged, I would say that the fundamental strategy the platforms have employed is some variation of an anti-steering restraint or what's called a most favoured nations clause. This ensures that any broker or dealer, say an app developer or a merchant on the Amazon site who wants to go off their platform and sell their wares at a lower price is barred from doing so.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, don't feel bad. They threaten everyone. They threatened to do bad things in the U.S., too, when the bill, the JCPA, appeared to be on its way to getting voted on at the Senate judiciary committee. Whether they want to admit it or not, I think Facebook and Google recognize that newspapers and quality journalism actually prevent their platforms from becoming a cesspool.

Canadian Heritage committee  What happened with the JCPA, unfortunately, is that large news publishers were excluded from participating in some of the protections. This would be like The New York Times, The Washington Post, maybe The Wall Street Journal. The rationale was that they are big enough to negotiate their own compensation, thank you very much.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a pretty expansive question. You're probably aware of all the antitrust litigation.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think the tactic that Google and Facebook are using here is to try to deflect the harm that they've caused onto some bad technology. They're trying to say that this was bad business acumen and that they're almost deserving of losing their businesses, but what they're doing is deflecting from the value appropriation.

Canadian Heritage committee  They are. There's legislation in the U.S., the self-preferencing bill, for example, the ban on self-preferencing that made it through the Senate on the judiciary committee—I think it was 16 to six. By the way, the JCPA made it through the Senate judiciary committee. It was very popular.