Google Pays Its Online News Act Tithe ⇥ thecanadianpressnews.ca

Tara Deschamps, Canadian Press:

The Online News Act aims to level the playing field by extracting compensation from search engine and social media companies with a total annual global revenue of $1 billion or more and 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or average monthly active users. Google, along with Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta, are the only tech firms that currently meet these criteria.

Google secured a five-year exemption from the act by agreeing to pay $100 million a year to media organizations. Meta has avoided having to make any payments by blocking access to Canadian news on its platforms.

The way Google is “exempt” is a little odd. Instead of negotiating with individual publishers, Google is submitting a lump sum to be divided by the Canadian Journalism Collective, the government entity responsible for administering the Online News Act.

This is a significant discount from the $172 million Google was expected to pay annually. You can tell it had the upper hand in these negotiations, at least compared with Meta. Canadian publications do not want to lose whatever is left of Google’s precious referrals before that dries up and is replaced with A.I. zero-click summaries.