A Google source told Cartt the Heritage minister was unavailable to discuss the bill as it made its way to finish line
By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA — Google will remove links to Canadian news from its search, news and discover products in Canada, the company announced on Thursday, a week after Meta Platforms Inc. made a similar announcement about ending news availability on its Facebook and Instagram platforms for all Canadian users in response to their joint opposition to Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which became law also last Thursday.
“C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada,” said Kent Walker, president of global affairs for Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., about a program through which, he said, Google has negotiated agreements involving over 150 news publications across Canada.
“Last year alone, we linked to Canadian news publications more than 3.6 billion times — at no charge — helping publishers make money through ads and new subscriptions,” said Walker. “This referral traffic from links has been valued at $250 million annually. We’re willing to do more; we just can’t do it in a way that breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work, and that creates untenable product and financial uncertainty.”
Google and Meta have both pushed back against the requirement under C-18 that they share revenues with news publishers for news content that appears on their platforms.
Google’s take on the Online News Act is that it would require it and Meta “to pay for simply showing links to news, something that everyone else does for free,” said Walker.
“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. We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our products.”
Last Thursday also found Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in 11th-hour talks with Google executives to break the impasse with the online search giant over its threat to withdraw news from its platform.
The discussions went a full week into overtime without reaching a resolution, according to a Google source, who told Cartt that the company attempted to meet with Rodriguez before C-18 was nearing the parliamentary finish line to discuss potential solutions and avoid negative outcomes, but was told that he was unavailable.
However, a source in the minister’s shop told Cartt on background that Rodriguez met with Google executives during the legislative process.
“We repeatedly offered constructive feedback and recommended solutions that would have made it more workable for both platforms and publishers, unlocking further financial support for Canadian journalism,” said Walker in Google’s statement. “We also endorsed the alternative model of an independent fund for Canadian journalism supported by both platforms and the Government, an approach that’s worked elsewhere.”
“We advocated for reasonable and balanced amendments to the legislation for over a year,” said Walker. “None of our suggestions for changes to C-18 were accepted.”
He explained that in last week’s discussion with Rodriguez, Google sought “clarity on financial expectations platforms face for simply linking to news, as well as a specific, viable path towards exemption based on our programs to support news and our commercial agreements with publishers.”
“While we appreciate the government’s acknowledgement that our concerns were reasonable and confirmation that the law will not apply until they adopt implementing regulations, they have not provided us with sufficient certainty that the regulatory process will be able to resolve structural issues with the legislation (such as forced payment for links and uncapped financial liability),” said Walker.
In a statement sent to Cartt, Rodriguez said that “we have had constructive conversations with Google, we’ve been working with them to provide clarity on next steps as we implement the Online News Act.”
The heritage minister’s statement called the decision by the world’s most popular search engine from its different products “unfortunate” but that “we’ll continue to work with” Google through the regulatory process.
Most of Rodriguez’s statement, however, seemed spare of a willingness to compromise.
“Hundreds of newsrooms have closed because billions in advertising revenue they used to rely on has shifted to Google and Facebook. This status quo is not working,” he said. “The Online News Act levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check.”
Rodriguez said that “big tech would rather spend money to change their platforms to block Canadians from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations. This shows how deeply irresponsible and out of touch they are, especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users.”
At an unrelated news conference in Mississauga on Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that his government’s conversations with Google are “ongoing.”
“It is important that we find a way to ensure that Canadians can continue to access content in all sorts of different ways,” he said, “but that also we protect rigorous, independent journalism that has a foundational role in our democracies – in holding authorities to account and keeping citizens informed about what’s going on in their local communities and around the world.”
