Google pulls its news service from Canada

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Google said it will shut down its Google News service in Canada and block links to news in its search engine there, following passage of a law that would force it to pay Canadian publishers for links to news.

The move comes in the wake of last week’s declaration by Meta that it would follow through on its promise to block links to news on its Facebook and Instagram in Canada, threatening a showdown with the Canadian government.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had accused Google and Meta, which are the only companies covered by the law, of bullying local politicians with threats to pull out.

A similar showdown over paying publishers in Australia three years ago was resolved after a last-minute change to that country’s proposed online news law, paving the way for Google and Meta to negotiate private deals with some of the country’s publishers. But Canada’s parliament has balked at efforts by the companies to water down the legislation.

Backers of Canada’s Online News Act claimed that it would lead to a “fair” sharing of the internet company’s advertising revenue with publishers.

However, Google on Thursday described the Canadian law as a “link tax” that would force it to pay up whenever any links to news from Canadian publishers appeared in its services.

The law “creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians’ access to news from Canadian publishers”, it said. It also claimed that charging for showing links “breaks the way the web and search engines are designed to work”.

Google had lobbied hard for changes to the law that would have made it more palatable. In contrast with Australia — where its threat to shut down its news service while that country’s online news law was being debated was seen as a heavy-handed provocation — it proposed new ways to pay Canadian publishers that it said would not have harmed its services.

While the law was designed to channel money to Canada’s news industry, the reaction by the tech companies threatens to leave publishers there worse off by robbing them of one of their most important sources of online traffic. According to a report on the digital news industry by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, Google and Facebook at their peak accounted for nearly half of the traffic to publishers in many countries, though that proportion has fallen as other sites’ news services have become more important audience generators.