Google LLC will remove links to Canadian news websites from several services, including its flagship search engine, in response to a recently passed law.

The company announced the decision today. The law in question, Bill C-18, was officially approved last week. It will require major online platform operators such as Google to compensate publishers for news content.

The search giant says that it’s removing links to Canadian news sites because not doing so would involve financial risks. Bill C-18 “creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians’ access to news from Canadian publishers,” Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc., wrote in a blog post today.

The move affects several of the search giant’s services.

Links to Canadian news sites will no longer appear in Google Search results and Google News. The company’s Discover feature is affected as well. Discover is a section of Google’s mobile app in which users can access a personalized news feed tailored to their interests.

As part of the move, Google also plans to stop operating Google News Showcase in Canada. That’s a kind of embedded news portal built into Google News and Discover. The portal displays content from multiple publications in a centralized interface.

Google compensates publishers for the articles it displays in the Google News Showcase. In 2020, the year the feature was introduced, the search giant stated that it would pay news organizations $1 billion to license their content. 

“As part of our Google News Showcase program, we have negotiated agreements covering over 150 news publications across Canada,” Walker wrote in today’s blog post. “We’re willing to do more; we just can’t do it in a way that breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work, and that creates untenable product and financial uncertainty.”

Google will remove links to Canadian news sites once Bill C-18 officially takes effect, which is expected to happen before the end of the year. The search giant’s decision is not entirely unexpected. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that the company was testing ways to remove news links in Canada as part of its efforts to prepare for the legislation.

Meta Platforms Inc. will also remove news content in response to Bill C-18. Last Thursday, the day lawmakers approved the legislation, the company announced plans to block news content on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. Like Google, the company launched a series of tests earlier this year to evaluate how it could go about removing news content.

The implementation of Bill C-18 comes about two years after Australia also introduced a law requiring tech giants to compensate publishers for news content. In response to the law, Meta temporarily removed Australian news content from Facebook and Instagram. The company reversed the move after the legislation was amended in a way that addressed its core concerns.

Photo: Unsplash