Google announced today that it won’t be pulling links to Canadian news sites after all, thanks to an agreement with the Canadian government over the controversial Online News Act, or Bill C-18. Google and Alphabet’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, released a statement saying that “after extensive discussions, we are pleased that the Government of Canada has committed to addressing our core concerns with Bill C-18,” a rule designed to make large web platforms pay news outlets for the use of their content. While the exact terms have yet to be released, Walker says the government has addressed Google’s previous concerns about creating “uncapped financial liability” for linking to articles, and a report suggests it will pay millions of dollars to publishers as part of the deal.
As a result, “while we work with the government through the exemption process based on the regulations that will be released shortly, we will continue to send valuable traffic to Canadian publishers,” Walker says. The previous plan would have excluded these links from Google Search, News and Discover.
Walker writes that the negotiations included the creation of a streamlined exemption process for companies that meet a “clear commitment threshold” – rumoured in a CBC News report to include an annual payout of about $100 million to local news companies, less than the $172 million federal officials had originally sought. According to the CBC, the final language of Bill C-18 will allow Google to negotiate with a single group representing media organisations, limiting its need to work with numerous individual companies. “After months of standing our ground, demonstrating our commitment to local journalism, to strong independent journalists who get paid for their work … Google has agreed to properly support journalists, including local journalism,” the outlet quoted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as telling reporters.
Google and Meta were two of the main targets of the Online News Act, which was passed earlier this year and comes into force in December. The rule, which Google has dubbed a “link tax,” is one of several national attempts to transfer money from large tech companies to news organisations. While both companies oppose the rule, Meta has taken a harder stance, removing news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada, while Google said it was making last-ditch attempts to negotiate. “Unlike search engines, we don’t proactively pull news from the web to put in our users’ feeds, and we’ve long been clear that the only way we can reasonably comply with the Online News Act is to end news availability for people in Canada,” Meta spokeswoman Lisa Laventure said in response to today’s news.
Both companies eventually struck a deal with Australian news outlets in 2021 in response to a similar law there.
