Bill C-18, the Online News Act, received royal assent yesterday, but any celebrations by the groups who lobbied for unprecedented government intervention into the news sector must surely have been tempered by the reality that quickly emerged. Meta confirmed that it would block news sharing from its Facebook and Instagram platforms in Canada, while Google met with Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez to see whether a compromise could be reach to avoid a similar outcome. The end result – at least for now – is a legislative mess that leaves no clear winners with Meta downgrading its platforms in Canada, Canadians cut off from their ability to share news on popular social media platforms, Canadian news outlets losing their second most important source of referral traffic, and the government looking to have made an epic miscalculation for having ignored the risks it created by establishing a mandating payments for links system with uncapped liability for the Internet companies.
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