Google Confirms It Will Also Remove Links to News Sites in Canada ⇥ blog.google

Cris Turner of Google:

You may have seen in the news that, as a result of Canada’s Bill C-18, we will be removing links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and will no longer be able to operate Google News Showcase in the country when the law goes into effect. We don’t take this decision lightly but the bill creates an unprecedented requirement that platforms pay for simply showing links to news, something that everyone else does for free. This creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating access to news.

The noise you are hearing right now is the shock as a bunch of Canadian publishers just realized traffic originating from Google’s search engine is going to drop to zero.