June 29 (UPI) — Google, the world’s largest search engine, announced Thursday that the company will remove links to news outlets from search results in Canada in response to a new law that will require tech giants to pay news outlets for sharing articles and news media.
The news comes a week after Facebook’s parent company Meta announced its plans to remove news on the platform and Instagram in Canada.
“Bill C-18 has become law and remains unworkable. The government has not given us reason to believe that the regulatory process will be able to resolve structural issues with the legislation,” representatives for Google said in a statement.
“As a result, we have informed the government that we have made the difficult decision that when the law takes effect, we will be removing links to Canadian news from our Search, News, and Discover products and will no longer be able to operate Google News Showcase in Canada.”
Canada’s parliament this week passed bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, which required royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will take about six months to come into force after it received the nod from the British crown.
“The Government of Canada has enacted a new law called Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), requiring two companies to pay for simply showing links to news, something that everyone else does for free,” Google said.
“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.”
Google had fought the passage of the bill and called it “the wrong approach to supporting journalism” in Canada.
“We’re disappointed it has come to this,” the company said. “We don’t take this decision or its impacts lightly and believe it’s important to be transparent with Canadian publishers and our users as early as possible.”
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez pushed back at Google after the company announced its decision.
“Big tech would rather spend money changing their platforms to block news from Canadians instead of paying a small share of the billions they make in advertising dollars,” he said in a statement.
“Canadians won’t be bullied. Big tech isn’t bigger than Canada.”
