Article content
OTTAWA — Advocates for the print and digital media industry are pushing back against Google, which they believe is bullying Canadians by limiting access to online news as part of a fight with Ottawa.
Media
Media advocate says Google 'bullying' Canadians in temporarily blocking news – Toronto Sun
Advertisement 2
Article content
“Canadians are going see this as a foreign company that is bullying Canadians, and I don’t think that this is going to go over well,” said Paul Deegan, president for News Media Canada, which represents hundreds of publications across Canada.
Article content
Google confirmed on Wednesday that it is blocking access to online news for less than four per cent of its Canadian users, in what the company describes as short-lived test in response to the Liberal government’s Online News Act.
Bill C-18 would require digital giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to negotiate deals to compensate Canadian media companies for displaying or providing links to their news content.
Larger media companies have praised the bill as a way to create a level playing field against Google and Facebook, which compete with them for advertising dollars. Tech companies have pushed back against the bill, arguing it is the wrong approach to enhance journalism.
Advertisement 3
Article content
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
“Ad revenues that used to be the mainstay of local journalism, big tech now profits from that journalism, but hasn’t paid for it,” said Peter Julian, House leader for the New Democrats, on Thursday.
“The era where big tech can work with no social responsibility as part of their business plan is over.”
When Australia introduced a similar law in 2021, Meta temporarily blocked news from Facebook.
Meta has previously threatened to make that move in Canada, but the company said Thursday it has not made any changes to its services in this country “at this time.”
The company has said it does not make significant money from news content.
Deegan said he spoke with publishers in Australia who warned this could happen in Canada, too.
Advertisement 4
Article content
“The feedback we’ve had from the Australians is that Google will be involved in a lot of sabre-rattling prior to the act coming in. But once it’s the law of the land, they’re a responsible corporate citizen, and they behave,” said Deegan.
On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez had also suggested that Google was using intimidation.
“This didn’t work in Australia, and it won’t work here because Canadians won’t be intimidated. At the end of the day, all we’re asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists when they use their work,” spokeswoman Laura Scaffidi said in a statement Wednesday.
Rodriguez has argued the bill will “enhance fairness” in the digital news marketplace by creating a framework and bargaining process for online behemoths to pay media outlets.
Advertisement 5
Article content
During Google’s test, affected users will see limited access to Canadian news.
The test is also affecting some Android users who use the Discover feature on their phone, which carries news and sports stories.
All types of news content are being affected by the test, which will run for about five weeks, the company said. That includes content created by Canadian broadcasters and newspapers.
The company said it runs thousands of tests each year to assess any potential changes to its search engine.
FRIENDS, which advocates for public broadcasting in Canada, said the move by Google shows why the government needs to regulate major tech companies.
“Google seems to have forgotten the old adage that with great power comes great responsibility. Instead of co-operating with lawmakers around the world to support and sustain the free press and democracy, Google continues to pursue financial ends at all costs,” said Marla Boltman, executive director of FRIENDS.
“This is not capitalism. It is greed.”
Continue Reading
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media Punch Newspapers
Source link
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
News3 hours ago
Bad traffic, changed plans: Toronto braces for uncertainty of its Taylor Swift Era
News5 hours ago
‘It’s literally incredible’: Swifties line up for merch ahead of Toronto concerts
News5 hours ago
Via Rail seeks judicial review on CN’s speed restrictions
Investment5 years ago
dynaCERT Inc. Invites You to Join Us at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference | INN – Investing News Network
Sports5 years ago
AP source: Bears acquiring quarterback Nick Foles from Jaguars – Sportsnet.ca
Media1 year ago
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
-
News21 hours agoChrystia Freeland says carbon rebate for small businesses will be tax-free
-
News21 hours ago
FACT FOCUS: Election officials knock down Starlink vote rigging conspiracy theories
-
News21 hours ago
Nova Scotia election promise tracker: What has been promised by three main parties?
-
News21 hours ago
Former B.C. premier John Horgan, who connected with people, dies at 65
-
News21 hours ago
Suncor Energy earnings rise to $2.02 billion in third quarter
-
News21 hours ago
Swearing-in ceremonies at B.C. legislature mark start of new political season
-
News21 hours ago
New Brunswick premier confirms her Liberal government will draft carbon pricing plan
-
News21 hours ago
B.C. teen with bird flu is in critical care, infection source unknown: health officer
Comments
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notifications—you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.
Join the Conversation