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Online News Act

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When Canada Tried to Make Big Tech Pay for News—and Facebook Said No

In the summer of 2023, if you were a Canadian scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, you noticed something strange. News articles had vanished. Links to the CBC, the Toronto Star, even your local community paper—all gone. It was as if the country's entire journalism ecosystem had been erased from social media overnight.

This wasn't a glitch. It was war.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, had decided to block all news content for Canadian users rather than comply with a new law called the Online News Act. The legislation, known commonly as Bill C-18, represented Canada's ambitious attempt to force tech giants to pay news organizations for the content that drove traffic to their platforms. Instead of paying up, Meta simply walked away.

The standoff revealed something profound about the power dynamics between governments and technology companies—and it raised uncomfortable questions about who really controls the flow of information in the digital age.

The Problem Bill C-18 Tried to Solve

To understand why Canada passed this law, you need to understand what happened to newspapers. For most of the twentieth century, local newspapers operated one of the most lucrative business models ever invented. They didn't make most of their money from subscriptions or even from advertising for stories. They made it from classified ads—those small listings for jobs, apartments, used cars, and garage sales that filled pages of every daily paper.

Then came Craigslist, Indeed, Zillow, and Facebook Marketplace. Within a decade, the classified ad business evaporated. Newspaper revenues collapsed. Newsrooms that once employed hundreds of journalists were gutted. Many papers closed entirely.

But here's what made this particularly painful for publishers: while they were hemorrhaging money, people were consuming more news than ever. They just weren't doing it by buying newspapers or visiting news websites directly. They were reading headlines and snippets on Facebook, sharing articles on Twitter, and clicking through from Google searches.

The tech platforms, publishers argued, were getting rich off content they hadn't paid to produce. Every time someone read a headline and a few sentences of an article in their Facebook feed, that was enough for many users. They never clicked through. The publisher got nothing, while Meta collected advertising revenue from keeping users engaged on its platform.

This was the "asymmetric bargaining position" that Bill C-18 aimed to fix.

How the Law Actually Works

Bill C-18 creates something called a "mandatory bargaining" framework. The basic idea is this: if a digital platform has significant market power and reproduces or links to news content, eligible news organizations can force that platform to negotiate compensation.

The law defines "digital news intermediaries" broadly—search engines, social media services, any platform that reproduces news content or facilitates access to it. But there's an important exception: platforms whose primary purpose is private communication between users, like WhatsApp or Signal, don't count.

Who counts as an eligible news organization? The law casts a fairly wide net:

Outlets that qualify as "Canadian journalism organizations" under the tax code
Licensed community, campus, or Indigenous broadcasters
Publishers primarily devoted to news of public interest, employing at least two journalists in Canada, and following recognized journalistic ethics standards
Indigenous news outlets covering both general interest stories and issues specific to Indigenous peoples

If negotiations fail, the process escalates through mediation and then to "final offer" arbitration—a mechanism where each side submits their best offer and an arbitrator picks one, with no splitting the difference. This creates strong incentives to negotiate reasonably.

Platforms can escape these obligations by reaching voluntary agreements with news organizations. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (known as the CRTC, the same body that regulates broadcasting) oversees the whole system and can grant exemptions to platforms that demonstrate fair dealing with publishers.

The Case For and Against

Supporters of Bill C-18 saw it as a necessary correction to market failure. News Media Canada, the trade association representing publishers, argued the law would "restore fairness and ensure the sustainability of the Canadian news media ecosystem." The logic was straightforward: if platforms profit from news content, they should share that value with the people who create it.

But critics saw serious problems.

Ariel Katz, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's law school, argued in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts that the bill created new rights for publishers that don't exist in copyright law. Normally, linking to content is perfectly legal—the Supreme Court of Canada had explicitly ruled in a case called Crooks v. Newton that hyperlinks are "indispensable" to the internet and "should be facilitated rather than discouraged." Bill C-18 essentially created a new right to be paid for links.

Even more concerning to Katz, the law allowed collective bargaining among publishers—essentially permitting what would otherwise be illegal cartel behavior. And it exempted these arrangements from competition law that would normally prevent companies from coordinating on prices. Katz worried that shielding media companies from competition, even well-intentioned protection, would "sedate" these supposed public watchdogs.

Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who has become perhaps the most prominent critic of Canadian digital policy, raised additional concerns. He noted that according to the Heritage Minister, the law would really only apply to Google and Meta—leaving out other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and the platform then known as Twitter. He also pointed out that the eligibility requirements for news organizations had been expanded beyond established standards, potentially requiring payments to broadcasters who don't actually produce journalism.

"That isn't funding for journalism or journalists," Geist wrote. "It is creating a subsidy program that only requires a CRTC-issued licence."

Sue Gardner, the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, offered a particularly sharp critique. She noted that media outlets "vigorously compete to maximize their presences" on Google and Facebook because of the exposure these platforms provide. If platforms were truly stealing value, why were publishers working so hard to appear on them?

Gardner also worried about unintended consequences. The law's requirement that platforms not discriminate against or give undue preference to news businesses could, if strictly interpreted, prohibit any algorithmic ranking of news content at all—potentially making platforms less useful for finding quality journalism.

Meta Calls Canada's Bluff

On June 22, 2023, Bill C-18 received royal assent and became law. Within weeks, both Google and Meta announced they would stop making news available to Canadians rather than pay.

Google's response was diplomatic but firm. Kent Walker, the company's president of global affairs, called the bill "unworkable" and said it "exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating access to news from Canadian publications." Google pulled Canadian publishers from programs like Google News Showcase—a service where Google pays outlets to curate highlighted stories—whose launch in Australia had come as that country implemented similar rules.

Meta's response was blunter: it simply blocked all news content for Canadian users of Facebook and Instagram.

This wasn't a surgical strike. Meta blocked all links to news, all accounts of news organizations, regardless of whether the outlets were Canadian. The company's automated systems even briefly blocked The Beaverton, Canada's satirical news site, based on metadata classification—a decision reversed only after the founder contacted the company.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez was furious. He criticized Meta for acting prematurely—the law hadn't even been formally implemented yet, with regulations still being drafted. The federal government announced it would immediately stop buying advertising on Facebook and Instagram. British Columbia, Quebec, the CBC, and major unions followed suit.

The Human Cost

The impact hit hardest in communities that could least afford it. Indigenous news outlets like Ku'ku'kwes News, Shubie FM, and public service announcements from the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke all had their content blocked. Small outlets like New Brunswick's River Valley Sun, CHCO-TV, and Nunavut's Nunatsiaq News—publications serving communities with few other news sources—found themselves cut off from their audiences on social media.

Then came the wildfires.

The summer of 2023 brought catastrophic wildfires across Canada. As flames threatened communities and evacuations spread, Rodriguez and his successor Pascale St-Onge called on Meta to lift its news restrictions. People needed up-to-date information about threats to their homes and lives. Meta refused.

The situation crystallized the stakes of the conflict. Meta was willing to let Canadians struggle to find emergency information rather than set a precedent of paying for news. The company calculated, correctly, that most users would adjust and that its platform would remain indispensable.

Google Blinks, Meta Doesn't

By late November 2023, Google reached a deal with the Canadian government. The company agreed to annual payments of around $100 million Canadian dollars into a collective fund managed by the media sector. In exchange, it would receive an exemption from the law's mandatory bargaining requirements.

But the deal looked nothing like what Bill C-18's architects had envisioned. The law was designed for individual negotiations between platforms and publishers. Instead, the government essentially negotiated on behalf of all Canadian news outlets, accepting a flat payment to a collective fund.

Michael Geist called this a fundamental reversal: "the government was ultimately able to strike a deal largely by changing the law, albeit through yet-to-be released regulations. After claiming for months that it would not get involved in negotiations and specifying in considerable detail what any deals between platforms and media companies needed to look like, the government dropped all of that and simply negotiated the best deal it could get."

Meta, meanwhile, held firm. The company made no deal and continued blocking news.

The Aftermath

By December 2023, researchers at McGill University calculated that Meta's news ban was costing Canadian news outlets approximately five million views per day from official news pages. Smaller sites were hit hardest, with some losing more than half their audience.

But Meta itself seemed fine. Nine months after implementing the ban, the number of people using Facebook and Instagram in Canada remained stable. Users found other things to look at. The company's gamble had paid off, at least in business terms.

The Economist, the London-based business weekly, observed that Meta was "emboldened" by its Canadian experience. In February 2024, the company announced it would not renew agreements it had struck with publishers in Australia under that country's similar law. A former Meta executive predicted the company would "walk away" from any future demands to pay for news links.

Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom organization, listed the Online News Act and Meta's response among the reasons Canada dropped seven spots on the World Press Freedom Index between 2024 and 2025.

What This Fight Was Really About

The clash over Bill C-18 was never just about money. It was about leverage.

For decades, technology optimists assumed that the internet's openness would decentralize power, making it impossible for any single entity to control information flow. Anyone could publish, anyone could link, and the best ideas would rise to the top.

What actually happened was different. A handful of platforms became the primary gateways through which most people discover and access information. Google handles over 90% of web searches. Facebook remains, for many users, synonymous with "the internet."

This concentration gives platforms enormous power—and creates a problem that markets alone cannot solve. News organizations need the platforms more than the platforms need any individual news organization. A platform can drop a publisher with minimal impact on its own business. A publisher that disappears from search and social media may simply cease to exist.

Canada's law was an attempt to use government power to rebalance this relationship. But it ran into a fundamental limitation: the platforms operate globally, while governments are national. Meta was willing to absorb the cost of losing Canadian news—and the political criticism that came with it—rather than set a precedent that could cost it billions worldwide.

The International Dimension

Canada isn't the only country wrestling with these issues. Australia passed similar legislation in 2021, though it included negotiating mechanisms that allowed deals to be struck before platforms took dramatic action. France and other European Union countries have implemented "ancillary copyright" rules requiring payments for snippets of news articles.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group representing tech companies, filed comments arguing that Canada's law might violate provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade deal that replaced NAFTA. The claim raises the possibility that mandatory payment schemes could face international legal challenges.

The Deeper Questions

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative opposition, called Bill C-18 an "instrument of censorship"—though critics noted the Conservatives under previous leader Erin O'Toole had proposed a similar scheme. The censorship charge seems overwrought; the law doesn't restrict what anyone can say. But Poilievre touched on something real: when private platforms become essential infrastructure for public discourse, their business decisions have civic consequences.

Meta didn't censor Canadian journalism. It just made it harder to find. Whether that distinction matters depends on how you think about the relationship between information access and democracy.

Meanwhile, the law's eligibility requirements raise their own concerns. By defining what counts as legitimate journalism—membership in recognized associations, adherence to ethics codes—the government becomes an arbiter of who gets to be called a journalist. Even if applied fairly, that's a power that could be misused.

And then there's the question of whether paying platforms for links actually helps journalism. The money from Google's deal flows to a collective fund, not to individual outlets based on the value they create. Large legacy media companies, with their political connections and industry associations, may capture most of the benefits while smaller digital-native outlets struggle to qualify.

A Parable for the Digital Age

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Bill C-18 saga is how it exposed the limits of national sovereignty in a networked world. Canada's Parliament passed a law. One of the world's most powerful companies said "no." And that was largely the end of it.

The government declared victory with the Google deal and expressed disappointment with Meta. Canadians adjusted to getting their news through other channels—or in some cases, not getting it at all. The platforms continued operating much as before, perhaps a bit warier of entering agreements that might create expectations elsewhere.

For supporters of journalism, the outcome is dispiriting. A law meant to create sustainable funding for news ended up demonstrating how little leverage governments have over global platforms. For critics of the law, it's a cautionary tale about well-intentioned regulations producing unintended consequences—blocking news precisely when people needed it most.

For everyone else, it's a reminder that the rules of the digital world are still being written, and that the balance of power between governments, platforms, and citizens remains very much unsettled. Canada tried to force Big Tech to pay for news. The result was not more funding for journalism, but less access to it.

That's either a failure of the law, a failure of the platforms, or both. But it's definitely not what anyone intended when Bill C-18 became law on that summer day in 2023.