Google Caves In Canada: Agrees To Pay $100m News Bribe To Avoid Direct Link Tax

It seems that every other day or so we get another story of big tech companies tossing principles out the window and caving to ridiculous government demands. The latest is Google, yet again, which has cut a deal with the Canadian government to bribe news orgs with $100 million to pay them off to avoid a more specific link tax. It’s the worst kind of corruption.

As we had detailed, almost everything about the Canadian Online News Act (C-18) was a corrupt monstrosity. Link taxes, themselves, are a fundamentally bad idea, that do real harm to both the open internet and the media.

I’ve seen lots of people on both sides “claiming victory” here. The Canadian government is claiming victory because they got the corporate welfare program they wanted, forcing Google to hand cash over to news organizations (the same news organizations that endorse politicians). Google and some of its supporters are claiming victory, because the structure of the deal more or less ignores the actual Online News Act for a side agreement that says “Google gives $100 million in exchange for Canada ignoring the actual law they passed.”

That is, the agreement is that Google forks over this money (close to half of what the government had claimed the company “owed” news orgs) and doesn’t have to negotiate with different news orgs, but with a single party that will distribute the money to news orgs.

Of course, we know how that setup works, because we’ve seen it before in other industries, like the music industry, and it always ends up a corrupt mess. The big news orgs will get some cash via this program, and be forever compromised in their coverage of Google. The smaller news orgs will get shafted. Down in Australia, which has a similar setup, despite the grand promises of everyone involved, smaller news orgs have suffered.

Michael Geist points out that this deal is more or less what Google had offered pre-C-18, but which the government had rejected. Further, he notes that this money will simply replace money that Google had already been giving to Canadian news orgs through other programs like Google Showcase.

Either way, while the deal isn’t a complete victory for the Canadian government, it’s still a loss to the open internet. As with Australia’s News Bargaining Code (and a similar deal by Google and Meta there), it only serves to inspire other countries to pass similar “bribe us too!” laws.

And anyone who thinks this is going to stop at news providers is not paying attention. Others are going to start demanding free cash from successful tech companies via government lobbying. Why wouldn’t you?

I had hoped that Google would actually stand by its principles on this one, but increasingly we’ve seen that Google has no problem compromising on those principles to cut deals with governments. Meta, for now, is still standing strong, but it caved in Australia and it’s probably only a matter of time until it caves here too.