By Sam Jabri Pickett
TORONTO (Reuters) – Google could be forced to remove links to news articles found in Canadian search results if the government passes legislation to force internet companies to pay news publishers, a company executive told lawmakers on Wednesday.
Canada’s proposed legislation would force platforms like Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, and Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc, to negotiate trade deals and pay Canadian news publishers for their content, part of a broader global trend for tech companies to pay for news permit.
“The extreme level of business uncertainty and unlimited financial liability that Google is being asked to accept is unreasonable,” Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president of news, told a Senate committee.
“If we simply have to pay publishers to link to their sites, making us lose money with every click, it would be reasonable for us, or any company, to reconsider why we would continue to do so,” he added.
This year, Google tested blocking some Canadian users’ access to news as a possible response to the legislation, a move Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a “horrible mistake”.
Google made connections to Canadian news publishers more than 3.6 billion times last year, Gingras said, which has helped those companies monetize ads and new subscriptions.
Introduced in April 2022, known as Bill C-18, the bill is the latest legislation aimed at making digital media platforms pay their fair share for connecting news content.
Ottawa’s proposal is similar to a landmark law that Australia passed in 2021, which also prompted threats from Google and Facebook to curb their services. Both eventually struck deals with Australian media companies after legislative changes were offered.
Since Australia’s law came into force, tech firms have approved more than 30 deals with media companies to compensate them for content-generating traffic.
The Canadian news industry has called for stricter regulation of tech companies to prevent them from forcing news companies out of the online advertising market. The news industry says it has suffered financial losses as companies like Google and Meta steadily gain larger market share of online advertising revenue.
(Reporting by Sam Jabri-Pickett in Toronto, additional reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa, editing by Steve Scherer and Josie Kao)