Google sez, "Canada who?"
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Google tells Canada it won’t pay “link tax,” will pull news links from search
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. Google's announcement yesterday followed a similar announcement by Meta that it will end news access on Facebook and Instagram.
The new law's "duty to bargain" requires large search engines and social media services to negotiate payments with news businesses or groups of news businesses. The law requires mediation and then arbitration if negotiations don't result in a deal. The law is expected to take effect in six months.
"We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that [bill] C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada," Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker wrote yesterday.
In the US, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) in March reintroduced their Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would provide an antitrust exemption "for publishers of online content to collectively negotiate with dominant online platforms regarding the terms on which content may be distributed." The bill was advanced to the full Senate by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 14-7 vote on June 15.
"We've seen a massive decline in local news over the past few decades driven, in part, by large online gatekeepers like Google and Facebook siphoning away more and more of the advertising revenue that news organizations have traditionally relied upon to fund their work," Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. "The JCPA... will help reverse this trend by allowing news publishers... to band together and enter into structured negotiations with the biggest online platforms over access to news content."
The proposed US law was opposed by the tech industry and about two dozen advocacy groups, which wrote in a letter that the "bill forces platforms to carry and pay for the content of any digital journalism provider that becomes part of a joint negotiation entity, regardless of how extreme their content."
There's also a California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) that would require "journalism usage fee payments" from online platforms to news providers. Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman called the proposal unconstitutional and wrote a letter to state senators urging them to reject it.
In addition to arguing that the proposed state law would violate the First Amendment, Goldman said it is "unlikely to create or sustain any journalism at all" and "will simply enrich the journalism operators' stockholders, even if they don't spend any payments on journalism at all."
