“While we work with the government through the exemption process based on the regulations that will be published shortly, we will continue sending valuable traffic to Canadian publishers,” Google said.
The Canadian government confirmed that Google will be allowed to negotiate with a single collective, instead of separately with multiple news organizations or groups of news organizations. “Google will have the option to work with a single collective to distribute its contribution to all interested eligible news businesses based on the number of full-time equivalent journalists engaged by those businesses,” St-Onge said.
New rules to effect the change will be implemented before the Online News Act is enforced. St-Onge’s announcement said the Canadian Heritage agency “will share more details about the final regulations following approval by the Treasury Board of Canada and prior to the Act coming into effect on December 19, 2023.”
Google said that “under the revised regulations, there is a path for publishers to continue to receive valuable traffic… which Google can allocate through a deal with a single collective of its choosing. Importantly, this will allow Google to bypass the requirement to settle with publishers directly or individually, and any corresponding mandatory bargaining obligations.”
No Canadian news on Facebook
Meta, the other company affected by the Online News Act, “ended its talks with the government last summer and stopped distributing Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram,” the CBC noted today.
Meta hasn’t changed its stance. “Unlike search engines, we do not proactively pull news from the Internet to place in our users’ feeds and we have long been clear that the only way we can reasonably comply with the Online News Act is by ending news availability for people in Canada,” Meta told the CBC.
Canadian officials previously estimated that Facebook would have to pay $62 million a year, but the deal with Google suggests that Meta could lower that amount significantly. Meta reportedly hasn’t resumed talks with the government.
“This [deal with Google] shows that this legislation works,” St-Onge said, according to the CBC. “Now it’s on Facebook to explain why they’re leaving their platform to disinformation and misinformation instead of sustaining our news system.”