In June, Google announced it would start removing news links from Canadian news outlets from its Search, News, and Discover products in Canada. Google claims it was making this move because of the Canadian government"s passage of Bill C-18, also known as the Online News Act, into law.
The law required tech companies like Google to make deals with news media outlets in Canada so they could post links to their content on their services. At the time, Google stated:
The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called “link tax”) creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians’ access to news from Canadian publishers.
Today, Google blinked, as both it and the Canadian government announced that a deal has been reached that will allow the company to comply with the Online News Act.
In a statement, the Canadian government said:
As part of this framework, Google will contribute $100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities. Google will have the option to work with a single collective to distribute its contribution to all interested eligible news businesses based on the number of full-time equivalent journalists engaged by those businesses.
The $100 million in Canadian dollars is roughly equivalent to about $74 million US dollars.
In a statement to Ars Technica, Google stated it had caused Canada"s government to make some changes in the Online News Act as well, stating the government had "agreed to a number of changes to address our deeply held concerns that C-18 would require payment for links and create uncapped financial liability through an unworkable bargaining process."
In its own blog post statement, Google added:
Following extensive discussions, we are pleased that the Government of Canada has committed to addressing our core issues with Bill C-18, which included the need for a streamlined path to an exemption at a clear commitment threshold.
While we work with the government through the exemption process based on the regulations that will be published shortly, we will continue sending valuable traffic to Canadian publishers.
While Canada and Google are now in agreement, the same cannot be said of Meta, which pulled news posts from Canadian media outlets from its Facebook and Instagram services in June, in protest of the Online News Act. The CBC got a response from a Meta spokesperson, who state:
Unlike search engines, we do not proactively pull news from the internet to place in our users" feeds and we have long been clear that the only way we can reasonably comply with the Online News Act is by ending news availability for people in Canada.
It would seem that the response from Meta would indicate there"s no solution to their issues with Canada that"s coming anytime soon.