Mid-Week Updates, No 31

US primary season, Canada's news curtailment

So last week I commented on the near inevitability of Donald Trump securing the GOP nomination, but realized I wasn’t very clear on the mechanism that would get him there. There are no legal barriers to stop him from running and it is up to the voters to give him access to the presidency, or not. The only real hurdle is of course the platform that facilitates the White House bid and that is the GOP. The party could in theory have barred Trump from running, and if not they could have marginalized him, both of which they have not done, on the contrary. So the only way to get an alternate outcome is by seeing who else can secure the party’s nomination by defeating the current frontrunner. Based on the numbers that is Ron DeSantis although he is a distant second right now and his campaign has really been struggling of late. This week he announced not only a shake-up of his team, he also went as far to make it clear that in his opinion Trump did lose the 2020 election. Hardly a surprise, but this is the sort of stuff that can rip apart the GOP. If you neuter the myth on which your opponent’s campaign is built, you are making headway. It could signal the start of a rearrangement on the right with the potential for a new and let’s say more forward looking direction.

So this is the core piece of the coming primary season. Can a true and tested conservative - who has a successful track record of governing - pry away the nomination from another one who has a pretty mediocre governing track record and is under indictment to boot. DeSantis can move the dial, but he will need to crack the notoriously radical primary voters away from Trump and in doing so bring himself the momentum of influential donors and the party establishment. Trump won’t go easily and his ultimate reaction could be to launch a third party bid and that would split the right-of-center vote and handily deliver Biden a second term.

That brings me to the incumbent. He’s suffering, has low poll ratings and rumours on Gavin Newsom (even though he stated he is not running) and even the in Democratic circles not overly popular Kamala Harris have started to emerge again. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson remain wildcards who are entertaining, interesting and useful to help test new concepts for debate, but they will never get the Democratic stamp of approval. But if you parse the news, the rumours and contrast them with the polls it is not hard to see that essentially America (and the world, yes) would like to see two other, possibly younger, people running for what is still the most powerful job on the planet. Both parties should consider the future and bring forward a talent pool to match that aspiration.

It is my intent to start to invest more time in discussing the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election. It will be a defining one and it also will hold some important data points for other democracies that are struggling with multiple crises while not having access to overly inspiring political talent. What I am giving you here above are the rough contours of what may happen in getting to the November 2024 election. And while a total cliché I will use it anyways: anything can happen. It really can.

Online News Act

A lot of people have been asking me about Canada’s Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18. In simple terms it forces large tech giants such as Google and Meta (Facebook) to negotiate payment for providing links to news articles on their platforms. Lots of discussion and expert advice went into providing input into this bill, but the Trudeau government largely ignored any attempt to water down the bill in a way that would reflect the actual workings of the internet. And that is that the tech giants facilitate access to news, and that it will be up to you as a user to pay for it or not. I don’t know how many times I have hit a subscription wall coming from Google or Facebook and had to make the ‘pay or move on’ decision. Layering a payment regiment on top of that because the tech giants generate billions in ad revenue simply does not make sense. A tax would have been simpler.

Now Meta has said it cannot comply with the law and will thus stop providing news links in Canada, it is not clear as yet what other giants such as Google and Apple will do. This also means that small and emerging media outlets who often rely on traffic driven by social media platforms will suffer incredibly. So far my newsletter has been safe, but who knows what will happen next. Trudeau’s government has brushed these concerns aside without giving any good reasons. It appears they do not care about smaller outlets as the legislation is driven by Canada’s larger media companies who in the new decentralized global news world have suffered tremendously. They need the government to support their broken business models as they lack the imagination to figure it out for themselves, essentially.

Absent a resolution, and the government is giving no indication to be willing to compromise by tweaking the legislation, the larger media players (like CBC) have spoken up. This week they asked Canada’s Competition bureau to investigate Meta as it is seen as acting in an ‘uncompetitive way’ by preventing access to the Canadian news and advertising markets. Right. Needless to say, they are barking up the wrong tree as Meta’s retreat is a direct result of the poorly framed legislation, legislation that is now not even accomplishing a modicum of its intent as there are zero dollars flowing back to Canada.

So it is unclear what will happen next and all eyes are on Google to see if it is the next one to bite the bullet and if Canada continues to play hardball. What is evident though is that free access to news, the ability to create new information sources and encourage their dissemination is now under serious pressure in Canada. It’s summer and it appears not a lot of people seem to be excited about it, but every Canadian should be up in arms over this shameful encroachment on a free press.

This is a summary on C-18, the one person in Canada who has been on top of this is professor Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa. Check out his writings and his daily commentary on X (formerly Twitter). A good intro to what is going on right now is this podcast where he is interviewed about the situation by Tara Henley. He provided expert testimony to the Senate when it deliberated the bill, none of his constructive feedback however was taken into account.

Photo: it is summer on the west coast, spectacular evenings.