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I legitimately wonder if Mark Carney does not know that the internet is very big and economically important.

Justin Ling@justinling.ca

We're still waiting for details about Canada's trade deal with Trump — specifically, what concessions America has extorted out of us. Sources tell me Carney may be sacrificing yet another pillar of Canada's Big Tech regulations. www.thestar.com/opinion/star...

The basic notion that we can cede our ability to regulate American big tech, in exchange for lower (but not zero!) steel and aluminum tariffs, is just a basic misiread of what parts of the economy are most important and valuable.

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If it’s like digital services, Trump will be demanding no sales tax on AI services. Americans will pay sales tax *plus* tariffs for Canadian goods, while American digital services (AI) have no added costs whatsoever, putting even Canadian alternatives at a disadvantage.

Is it possible that Carney (like me) simply thinks that the Online News Act is an idiotic idea that American big tech couldn't care less about because they DON'T CARE if Canadians can't share news on their platforms because that doesn't impact their bottom line at all and only really harms us?

The problem with this perspective is that if we back down on the digital service tax, or the online news act, or the digital streaming levy, we effectively shut the door on any future effort to make any of those policies better, or make any other kind of adjacent policy.

I guess capitulating on digital sovereignty by Brookfield Boy, as well as the Gordon Howe Int'l bridge, the additional F-35s, the reciprocal tariffs, the booze off of the shelves has opened EVERY DOOR to our economic advantage. The Kool-Aid drinking needs to be weaned.

Personally, I think that getting rid of the idiotic, counterproductive, self-harming digital services statutes that would harm Canadians while the big tech companies roll their eyes at it all as meaningless to their bottom lines is something they should have done the day after Trudeau resigned.

I'm not interested in litigating the specific merits of the Online News Act. But if you think scrapping the Online News Act only affects that law, as drafted, you don't understand that we're effectively shut down the possibility of passing any regulation in a large swath of digital policy space.

Well if the federal government wanted to convince me that they're capable of passing meaningful and effective legislation in the digital policy space they shouldn't have started by passing disingenuous, effectively meaningless, counterproductive and harmful legislation in the digital policy space.

Which is why, from my perspective, it was a bad idea to start with a couterproductive and ineffective Act that harms Canadians while simply being ignored by the tech companies it targets who couldn't care less about simply complying with the law by preventing us from sharing news on their platforms.