Last week, the federal government announced a deal with Google to keep Canadian news indexed on their search engine.

This was fortunate for us on a few levels. The first was that we had been waiting for a while to learn what Google would do in the face of Bill C-18. As we had reported earlier, we were caught up in the Bill C-18 fiasco when Meta decided to block our posts on their platforms. We were waiting to hear whether or not Google would follow suit. With this new agreement, it appears that the worries from Google are no longer there, however, Meta's holdout still affects us, which brings us to the purpose of our episode today.

The second fortunate part of the news was that it coincided with our recording of this episode with our guest. We had invited Michael Geist to discuss what seemed to us to be some inherent hypocrisies in the federal government's Bill C-18 application. With the government trying to offset the losses for media giants, through payroll tax credits, we pondered where was the support for small operations like us in this scheme. What is the future of Canadian media in this environment? Will this help or hinder us?

We asked Michael all about it.

You can listen to our previous episode on Bill C-18 here:

https://905er.ca/2023/07/matt-cundill-on-how-bill-c-18-will-hurt-podcasters/

This Episode is brought to you by Graham Agnew of Dominion Lending

https://grahamagnew.ca/

It takes money and time to do this podcast. We love doing what we do, but please consider supporting us if you can so we can keep improving, and keep paying the bills.

You can become a monthly or yearly patron on our website at 905er.ca. We didn’t like sharing your generosity with that other ‘patron’ website, so we created our patron system. Become a patron, get member benefits and our eternal gratitude, and know that you’re not mainly funding some crummy web company in the US. Win-win!

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Nicholas Paul: sound editing.

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