Canada’s Online News Act Comes as a Big Boost to Indian Newspapers

A recent Canadian regulation on news brokers like Google has greatly helped Indian newspapers and their digital news outlets fight the exploitation of Google's exclusive news content. Indian newspapers and their digital editions oppose Google's monopoly and abuse of status.

According to sources, Google earns a huge amount of advertising revenue through the content generated by the digital editions of these newspapers. However, Google does not share the revenue of pays back in this regard, which results in a huge financial loss for these news publishers in India.

Canada's regulations state that the Online News Act was created to regulate digital news brokers and improve the fairness of the Canadian digital news market. This law applies to digital news brokers like Google, who have a major imbalance in their ability to negotiate with news companies.

The proposed rules ensure that platforms like Facebook and Google pay fairly to the news publishers for their content. Australia also passed a similar law last year. The law would require Google and Facebook to pay the original news publisher for the content on their platform.

Top Indian newspapers and their digital editions represented by DNPA, submitted a complaint under Section 19 of the Competition Act, 2002 alleging violation of Section 4, against Alphabet, Google, Google India Private Limited, and Google Ireland Limited.