Google has backed off its threat to block Canadian news from its site in protest of a new law meant to aid struggling media organizations, agreeing to a deal on Wednesday to pay $100 million to Canadian news operations each year for the right to share their links on its platform. The agreement is the result of months of negotiations related to the Online News Act, or Bill C-18, which passed the Senate in June and aims to make “dominant platforms compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services,” according to the Canadian government. As of now, the bill would only practically apply to Google and Meta.According to the bill, the tech giant and media industry will first negotiate voluntarily, and if unable to come to an agreement, would enter mediation and, if that fails, then submit “a final offer” to an arbitration panel, which would choose one of the offers. The money will then be distributed to outlets according to the number of full-time journalists.Google also got the dollar figure it wanted. It had estimated that the annual payment should end up around $100 million, whereas the Canadian government had reportedly argued that Google should annually fork over as much as $170 million.In a statement published Wednesday, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the government had acknowledged the company’s “concerns” and “committed to addressing our core issues”“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,” Walker wrote in the statement. The Online News Act will go into effect later next month.
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“Following weeks of productive discussions, I am happy to announce that we have found a path forward with Google for the implementation of the Online News Act,” Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a statement printed by Reuters. “This will benefit the news sector and allow Google to continue to play an important role in giving Canadians access to reliable news content.”As a result of the bill, Meta made the decision to no longer allow Canadian articles on Facebook and Instagram as a result of the Act. Google was similarly critical of the Act, and threatened to pull Canadian news off Google News and its search engines when the law took effect. “We’re disappointed it has come to this,” the company had said at the time. Google had called the bill “unprecedented," saying it was more strict than comparable legislation in Europe and exposed the company “to uncapped financial liability” for “simply showing links to news, something that everyone else does for free.”The deal as announced Wednesday appears to include a number of wins for Google. As outlined by the heritage minister, Google will negotiate with one group that represents the entire Canadian media ecosystem. This had been the tech giant’s preference, rather than having to negotiate with individual outlets, which came with a higher liability risk, according to the CBC.
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