Not satisfied with ruining social media, the federal government is now going after the revenue of online streaming services like Netflix for money to promote Indigenous radio.

This morning, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced that online streaming services that earn over $25 million and operate in Canada would be forced to pay 5% of their revenues made in the country to the federal government to help pay for various programs, like Indigenous broadcasting.

“These base contributions will be directed to areas of immediate need, such as local news on radio and TV, French-language content, Indigenous content, and content created by and for equity-deserving communities, official language minority communities, and Canadians of diverse backgrounds,” CRTC CEO Vicky Eatrides said following the announcement.

According to the announcement, the change is being brought in under the Online Streaming Act and will take effect on September 5th of this year, giving online streaming services little time to come up with a plan in response to this law.

Likely to backfire and have unintended consequences

If the sister law, the Online News Act, has a lesson in it, it’s that Canadians usually suffer the cost of the federal government trying to bully major corporations out of their money.

Following the announcement of the Online News Act, Facebook, one of the largest social media platforms for sharing news, didn’t just roll over and pony up the money it was making off of Canadian news links.

Instead, it straight up banned the sharing of all Canadian news on its platform, effectively snuffing out independent creators and small media outlets across the country.

Meanwhile, federally funded organizations, like the CBC, were left mostly unaffected, as they tend to be less successful on social media with organic audiences anyway and can always fall back on taxpayer dollars.

So far, the Online Streaming Act has only diminished the reach of Canadian Youtubers who don’t focus on Canadian content. However, now that the federal government has decided to go after Netflix and Amazon, the effects of the act could be much more widespread, at least if streaming services follow Facebook’s lead.