Peter Menzies: Canada’s Gamble With the Digital Services Tax May End Badly

Commentary Canada seems to be having difficulty understanding and regulating the internet. That’s an easy conclusion to reach given the track record and negative responses so far to the Online News Act, the Online Streaming Act, and the Digital Services Tax. This month marks the first anniversary of Meta’s implementation of its decision to no longer permit the posting of links to news stories and their websites in Canada. This came in response to the Online News Act, which was based on the false premise that Meta was stealing news content and profiting from it without fairly compensating the companies that produce news. Rather than pay out hundreds of millions of dollars and face the prospect of governments around the world duplicating Canada’s law, Meta chose to get out of the business of carrying news, something it estimated produced a value of $230 million annually in referred traffic to publishers....