A couple of days after Canada enacted its Online News Act, Google says it’s delisting all the local news links to Canadians across its products.
These include Google Search, Discover and the News platforms, where Canadians cannot see news from local publications. The same was followed by Meta earlier, by blocking all the news content on Facebook and Instagram apps.
Ditching the Content For Good
Following the suite of Meta, Google is dumping the Canadian news content on all its major platforms today – which includes Search, News and Discover, citing the country’s new law enacted this week.
Named the Online News Act (also known as Bill C-18), the law forces the tech giants like Google and Meta to pay local news publications to share their content on their platforms. This resulted from a prolonged decline in revenue for the local news publications that pushed the government to act accordingly.
Well, both Meta and Google have earlier warned that a law of such will never work and is against their policies. Yet, the Canadian parliament has passed the bill this week, asking social media platforms to pay up for using their local news content.
But to the contrary, Meta dumped the local news content to all Canadians earlier this week – even though the act kicks in six months later! Google now follows this suite, as the company delists all Canadian news content from its Search, News and Discover today. Talking about this, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said;
“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.”
Google and Meta faced a similar situation in Australia last year and threatened to remove their news links from their platforms. But following an amended act from the Australian government, the companies eventually cut deals with the local publishers.
