Metaがカナダのオンラインニュース法案C-22に反対表明 Meta’s Position on Canada’s Bill C-22

Meta has formally laid out its opposition to Canada's Bill C-22, the latest legislative attempt in Ottawa to require digital platforms to compensate news publishers for the display of their content. The company argues that the proposed framework, like its predecessor, fundamentally misreads how the open web works and would force it to reconsider whether news can remain available on Facebook and Instagram in Canada.

At the heart of Meta's argument is the claim that links shared voluntarily by users should not trigger mandatory payments to publishers. The company contends that news represents a small and declining share of what people see on its apps, and that publishers are the primary beneficiaries of the referral traffic that links generate. From Meta's perspective, the economic logic of the bill is inverted: platforms are being asked to pay for content that drives audiences toward publishers' own properties.

The context for C-22 is the 2023 Online News Act (Bill C-18). Rather than enter into mandatory bargaining, Meta removed Canadian news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada ahead of the law taking effect, and that block remains in place today. Google initially threatened a similar withdrawal but ultimately negotiated a roughly 100 million Canadian dollar annual contribution to a collective fund, allowing it to keep news in Search. Meta is signaling that it would rather repeat its earlier withdrawal than accept a comparable obligation under C-22.

The Canadian debate is part of a broader global pattern that began with Australia's News Media Bargaining Code in 2021 and has since influenced the European Union's copyright directive and a wave of state-level proposals in the United States, including in California. Meta has been steadily disengaging from direct financial relationships with publishers across these jurisdictions, declining to renew commercial deals in Australia and reducing its investment in dedicated news products such as Facebook News, which it shut down in several markets.

For publishers, the stakes are significant. Studies of the Canadian block suggest that traffic referrals from Meta properties effectively vanished for many domestic outlets, with smaller and local publishers among the hardest hit. Some research has indicated that the gap was partly filled by alternative sources, including less reliable content, raising concerns about information quality on the platforms during election periods and crises.

The timing also matters because the underlying economics of online news are shifting again. The rise of generative AI assistants and AI-powered search experiences from companies including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic is changing how readers discover news, often without clicking through to publisher websites at all. Several large publishers have pursued licensing deals directly with AI companies, suggesting that the locus of negotiation may be moving away from social platforms. Whether C-22 advances in its current form, is amended to address Meta's objections, or follows C-18 into a standoff will likely depend on how Canadian lawmakers weigh the precedent set two years ago against the continuing decline of news visibility on major platforms.