Google promises to restore access to news at lively committee meeting

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will stop limiting consumer access to news links on Mar. 16, company executives told the House of Commons Canadian Heritage Committee Friday. Two members of the Canadian leadership team of the tech giant appeared at a fractious session of the panel. The committee had requested that more members of the executive team, including some from the United States, show up. MPs from all four parties on the committee attacked Google for its decision to limit access to a small number of users. Jason Kee, public policy manager for the web giant, estimated that less than four per cent of users would be affected. “Companies frequently use hypothesis-driven tests, also known as AB testing, on a small percentage of real users to collect data about new features or changes before deciding to launch them at scale,” he explained. The company does about 11,500 such tests each year in response to product concerns. Very few of them result in large changes to the internet service. “These are just tests, no decisions have been made about product changes,” he stressed. “We are simply doing our due diligence in the most responsible way possible.” Sabrina Geremina, VP and country manager for Canada for Google, reiterated her employer’s opposition to the government’s Online News Act. “We have been transparent about our concern with Bill C-18,” she said in her opening statement. “We have worked constructively with Parliamentarians and offered reasonable and balanced solutions.” She repeated Google’s assertion that the legislation would incentivize click bait at the expense of responsible longform reporting. Geremina dismissed talk of helping news media do their jobs. “C-18 is no longer about supporting journalism. C-18 platforms would be subject to an uncapped financial liability merely for providing free links to the news that Canadians are searching for,” she stated. As MPs tried to get answers about the process of limiting access to content, Geremina frequently came back to her response that the venture was only a test. The politicians grew frustrated with the evasive answers. At one point, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner demanded and got committee approval to make the witnesses testify under oath. This is unusual in Parliamentary committee hearings. The legislators were also upset that the company had not provided all the documents asked for by the committee. Geremina said that Google was in the process of sifting through the documentation and would produce it eventually. Conservative MP Martin Shields called the blocking tests a mistake and said they led to the belief that Google was punishing Canadians for C-18. “Perception is reality,” he told the witnesses. When NDP MP Lindsay Mathyssen asked if the decision to implement the blocking was made in Canada or the United States, Geremina did not answer directly. She finally admitted that senior management in the U.S. was aware but would not specify who made the decision. At that point committee chair Hedy Fry put on the record that questions were not being answered. When Mathyssen asked if MPs were being targeted for the tests, Geremina said the tests were purely random. Kee explained that IP addresses were used to determine who would fall under the scope of the system. Tory Marilyn Gladu gave the Google executives one of their few bright spots of the session. She asked about a deal the web company had signed in Taiwan earlier this week. It is creating a fund for Taiwanese media firms. Both Geremina and Kee said they would like to see a similar program take hold in Canada. On Thursday the Senate continued its debate on C18. Ontario senator Donna Dasko pointed to a survey done by Abacus Data on what people expect following passage of the legislation. “On the topic of polls, that Abacus Data poll conducted for Google, which I mentioned earlier, shows that two thirds of Canadians don’t want Google Search to change the way it operates when Bill C-18 comes into effect,” she told her colleagues. “Yet, we have just seen Google two weeks ago blocking news content in a test run related to this bill. This company is doing exactly the opposite of what Canadians want, according to the company’s own polling.” Nova Scotia senator Colin Deacon, like Dasko a member of the Independent Senators Group, kept up the criticism of the web browser when he spoke on the bill. “In response to questions about its actions, Google assured us that less than four per cent of Canadian users will be impacted by this random testing,” he said in the Red Chamber. “Given that an estimated 92 per cent of Canadians use Google and the average user conducts three to four searches a day, Google’s assurance — or threat — implies that over 1 million Canadians have or will have reduced access to Canadian news several times per day for the duration of this test. Which million Canadians, I wonder.” –Reporting by Paul Park at ppark@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Google promises to restore access to news at lively committee meeting

News | March 10, 2023

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Google promises to restore access to news at lively committee meeting

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