Meta is still out. No news media in Canada can share their articles there anymore. And Google has been exempted from the law - that's how the govt and google reached an agreement. The law called for google to bargain individually with each publisher, but instead google negotiated a $100 million payment with the government in order to have them not apply the law.
> The move follows the passage of Canada's Online News Act, aimed at boosting revenue for Canadian journalism outlets by mandating compensation from companies like Meta and Google's parent company, Alphabet, for hosting and linking to their content.
It's advertising. Google drives traffic to the articles.
If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies would be the bigger losers than Google would be. Admittedly Google isn't Facebook -- it's value to users comes from indexing everything. This is probably why they accepted this deal.
As a Canadian, I wish that they'd just gone ahead and blocked Canadian news.
“The agreement would see Canadian news continue to be shared on Google's platforms in return for the company making annual payments to news companies in the range of $100 million, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told CBC News.”
Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.
This isn’t correct. News media can, if they want, completely restrict google/meta previews or even disable google. Meta/google are huge revenue drivers for media.
But through a complex narrative the media has pretended that google and meta take their money, and so they got the govt to blackmail google/meta.
It didn’t work with meta. The blocked news (one of the options the law allowed). The media squawked because this hurt them, while meta is doing fine.
Ultimately now CBC can’t share on meta, and lost any deals it had with google/meta. They’ll get a portion of Google’s $100 million and that’s it.
Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers simply for linking to their sites.
Google offered News Showcase, where they paid participating orgs for quality content curated by professional editors. They were paying $25 million a year to Canadian journalists. That program is now not available in Canada. Facebook had a similar program of the same scale that they also pulled.
This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
Pulling out of that market is far easier
In response to a new Canadian law requiring payments to news organizations, Google said it will remove links to Canadian news sources from Google Search and Google News for users who access the services in Canada
It ended with a negotiation and Google agreeing to pay $100M+ annually to Canadian news organizations, so I wouldn't exactly call that a "win" for them.
I'm also Canadian and feel the same. I don't like Google or Meta but this is just the media trying to be greedy. If the incoming likes from Google were harmful they would have configured a robots.txt. They are just trying to lobby laws to get extra money. But they were too full of themselves to realize that they need Google and Meta at least an order of magnitude more than Google or Meta needs them.
The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle. Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.
I live in Canada and I'm 100% on meta / Google's side.
If you mandate that to link to you I must pay you. Then you get to deal with people not linking to you. It's a bad law, and it's basically mugging tech companies to prop up big news orgs.
Where is Google News on this? Searching for "fire yellowknife" I see for example links to articles from the Toronto Star, CBC and Calgary Herald. Is Google paying for the privilege of displaying those links?
Don’t be misled. This is not government trying to protect Canadian journalism. This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism. Their only interest is in continuing to profit from lackluster offerings while holding down the pay of journalists by ensuring they have very few employment options in the country.
its going to do the exact opposite of what they said its going to do. Google and meta will disable linking to canadian news sites, canadian news sites won't receive the revenue from those visits.
Meanwhile american news is still free to share in canada, so linking to american news will be the norm and the act to protect and fund canadian news will create an increase in consumption of US news and will remove money these companies already receive from google traffic.
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