California/Fraser Valley – “We’re disappointed it has come to this.” – Google News (ironic) release.
In a social media posting on June 29, Google stated: Unfortunately, we’ve made the difficult decision that when Bill C-18 takes effect, we will remove Canadian news links from our Search, News and Discover products.
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. 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.
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 C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.
We’re disappointed it has come to this. 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.
What happens now?
We plan to participate in the regulatory process and will continue to be transparent with Canadians and publishers as we move forward. We hope that the Government will be able to outline a viable path forward. Otherwise, we remain concerned that Bill C-18 will make it harder for Canadians to find news online, make it harder for journalists to reach their audiences, and reduce valuable free web traffic to Canadian publishers.
FVN’s Operator/Owner and News Director for chillTV and abbyTV Don Lehn :” This is a knee jerk reaction to a problem that I feel, Social media created on their own. Google, Facebook, Twitter all did not do a proper job of self regulation and quite frankly, this sounds like mass gaslighting. It sounds like a six year old claiming that it wasn’t their fault.”
