Canada has been left out of a recent expansion of Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot known as Bard as the big tech giant continues its fight with the federal government over the Online News Act.
Canada has been left out of a recent expansion of Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot known as Bard as the big tech giant continues its fight with the federal government over the Online News Act.
Canada has only specified Meta and Google as targets for the law.
The official list of digital news intermediaries hasn’t yet been published by the CRTC. Although Alphabet and Meta have been in the news, it’s very likely Microsoft will also be impacted and by proxy all services that use Bing (including Yahoo and DDG).
Microsoft doesn’t have a dominant market position in anything news-related, though. Why would they get targeted?
Why wouldn’t they? Microsoft operates the largest search engine used in Canada after Google, owns LinkedIn which is one of the top 10 social media platforms with a heavy news aggregation focus like Facebook, provides a default news aggregation feed pre-installed on all Windows computers, etc.
By the wording of the bill, there’s no reason they can’t be labeled as having a “prominent market position” or “a strategic advantage over news businesses”. And this applies especially so if Alphabet and Meta recuse themselves from the Canadian news market.
If the spirit of the bill is to get money from big corporations to support Canadian news organizations, then there’s no reason not to target Microsoft. And the fact that MS has already been consulted on the bill and released a statement about it strongly suggests they’ll be on the list.
Bing has like 5% market share lol
And LinkedIn? The amount of link volume coming out of LinkedIn is negligible.
Microsoft’s core businesses are Windows, Office, and Azure. They might be “big tech” but they’re not “big ad tech”.