I was trying to talk to a friend the other day about my sense that “real life” is being eroded by, basically, the internet.

By “real life” I meant, vaguely, the places where we live. The things and people we live among. 

We tend to overlook them as we soar about in the cloud, flitting from one dazzling image or video to the next on endless scrolling loops. Hunting down the right toaster or pair of boots on Amazon or, for the brave, Temu.

There are a few key essentials to keeping life real. It needs to be local life, on the ground, in the here and now. And there are some basics: jobs — both good jobs and any jobs; homes; money. 

The news for some time now has made it clear that these can no longer just be taken for granted. 

Amazon, for example, announced January 22 that it is shutting down operations in Quebec —closing seven warehouses and laying off 1700 people. 

Why? Because 230 of its workers had dared to form a union. Certified in May 2024, it forced Amazon into having to negotiate a fair contract. Those negotiations were still underway. It’s illegal in Quebec to shut down a factory in the middle of a labour negotiation, but try telling Amazon that. 

Rather than create a fair contract for its workers, the company made a mockery of labour law, Quebec law, the Canadian government, worker’s rights, human decency, you name it. A small-scale version of the wholesale destruction of the civil service underway south of the border.

Amazon has more than 45,000 employees in Canada, who work at what it calls “fulfillment centres” — warehouses — in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. It could pull out of the whole country if it wanted. That is, of course, the threat. Pulling out of Quebec was not about money. It was about Amazon controlling its operations. 

It will not brook interference, never mind ethics. 

Amazon is a global monopoly. No particular place really matters to it. Its main operations are centered on the internet and in what it calls the “cloud.” In 2023, it generated US $575 billion in revenue. 

I could compare it to a sovereign state, but I think that would be wrong. Amazon is far more powerful than a sovereign state. It is above the laws of nations. 

It operates according to its own rules, along with the other usual suspects: Meta (owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Messenger and a massive AI system). Google (controls internet search, brokers virtually all online advertising, for both sellers and buyers). None of these mega corps operate according to any recognizable principles of fairness or reciprocity. 

You might have to do that if you were in a common market, but they are not. 

Take Meta. It removed all journalism from all of its platforms in Canada because it didn’t want to pay for reproducing it. A move very like what Amazon just did in Quebec. It opposes a piece of Canadian legislation called the Online News Act, which requires that digital platforms pay for the important and expensive work of journalists when it reproduces it on its platforms. The Online News Act is the law in Canada, but so what. 

It offered Meta a convenient way to pursue its war on legitimate journalism and researched news. Just cancel it. It interferes with the algorithm. It takes people off its platforms. Who needs it. 

One thing I have noted since coming to publish a newspaper: it takes both money and time not only to research, write, edit, and fact-check news stories, but to print and distribute them, on paper, in real life, for local readers.

When you sweep this work up into the digital economy, endless copies of stories can be made effortlessly, turned into “content,” to engage “users,” and therefore sell advertising, for another, global company. 

Not surprisingly, Meta and Google are making out like bandits. Newspapers and magazines and digital news sites, which I hear more and more often now dismissed as the “legacy media,” are not. 

The advent of AI, which is being “trained” on contemporary writing, its makers endlessly mining The New York Times and individual author’s novels without even a thought of compensation, is only intensifying this process, which in the good old days used to be called plagiarism. Copying. Using another’s work without permission or acknowledgement, never mind payment. It violates a set of 300-year-old laws called copyright.

Have you noticed how, when you type a query into Google now, you don’t get directed to a news site, or to Wikipedia (another target; it presents fact-checked, researched, even footnoted information; Musk recently called it Wokepedia) — you get an AI scroll delivering an answer? Guess where that answer came from? 

The big defense of all these platforms was that they directed “users” to the news sites they pirated. We were supposed to be grateful. 

Not anymore. 

Unlike Meta, Google has committed to paying Canadian news organizations $100 million a year for five years for the right to reproduce news on its search engine. 

But the Online News Act could be on the chopping block of the Trump Tariffs.

The Trudeau government, along with a very few others — in France and the U.K. and Australia — has been drafting legislation that stands up to these massive, global, multi-billion-dollar corporations by demanding some kind of reciprocity, that they pay a tax on the revenues they make on what they take.

The Digital Services Act imposes a 3 percent tax on companies that operate online marketplaces, advertising services, social-media platforms, and those that earn revenue from the sale of user data. 

It’s retroactive to 2022 and covers Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb. The deadline to file a return is June 30 of this year. 

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the tax will bring in $7.2-billion over five years.

It, too, is on the block. It will play a major role in any tariff “negotiations,” which may go much the way Amazon’s did in Quebec. Or that Meta’s did with news.

These reasonable-seeming taxes of 2 or 3 percent on revenues — taxes that Google just turned right back to the advertisers using the platform — are some of the hidden targets of Trump’s war on Canada.

One of the first executive orders Trump signed unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of all efforts to establish digital tax rules. 

It directs the U.S. treasury secretary to investigate countries with tax rules that are “extraterritorial or disproportionately affect American companies.”

Remember all those tech billionaires lined up at the inauguration. They paid handsomely for a seat at Trump’s table.

Ed Note: This column has been updated to note that Trump’s threatened tariffs have not yet been imposed.