Google hits a paywall. On the heels of a deal struck last week between Ottawa and Google, the search behemoth will pay Canadian news publishers $100 million/year for the privilege of hosting their content. Is that a win for Ottawa? Well, on one hand, Canada is now one of the first countries to compel digital platforms to pay (and help keep alive) news publishers. On the other, $100 million is the exact number Google offered pre-standoff and 42% less than what the government wanted. Either way, at least the public can once again access news through Google.
Ottawa has agreed to set a $100-million yearly cap on payments that Google will be required to make to media companies when the government’s controversial online news legislation takes effect at the end of the year.
The legislation is called The Online News Act passed earlier this year and would force platforms like Google, Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, linking, previewing, and directing users to online Canadian news content.
Agree. Bad precedent. Links are how the internet works.
ChargingPaying to link is absurd.I agree a website, a social media site, or a search engine having to pay to display a link and direct users to another site is extremely ill thought out on the Canadian governments part.
Tbh though, google paying this “fee” may work out on its best interest.
Now that google pays for the content it can actually just “summarize” or even just scrape the whole article and display it on its own site directly, and inject its own ads.
This way google can pull all the ad revenue it’s self, and this way users won’t be directed to the original news site where the media companies have their own ads or paywalls trying to make money of their content.