> The Canadian government told Google and Meta that if a link to a newspaper story ever appears in search, or if a journalist ever posts a link to a story on Facebook, then they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper.

This is first-class bullshit. Google and Meta made their money by co-opting third party content, concentrating audiences into their own portal, and selling advertising against it - often through algorithmic dark patterns. This is a disreputable business model that’s as old as iframes, but somehow its acceptable for these gigacompanies to do it.

To characterise this as “they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper” is just buying into the kind of self-interested “no” that the article purports to discuss. They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers, and then started to charge a premium to the providers for placement in the algorithms. Meta has been the most egregious of these but Google has been moving in this direction for years.

These companies have more than enough money to pay for their content, but that would break their protection racket business model.