Kent Walker, president of global affairs for Google and its parent company Alphabet, says he’s disappointed it has come to this point but that the legislation remains unworkable.
This is… crazy 😧
Meta removing links to news is one thing but from Google is very big, and will be very bad for Canadians.
I can see it being shitty for you and I when searching for current news, the results being populated with low quality blogs/disinformation websites being the top results.
It’s also going to be disastrous for Canadian news outlets that get organic traffic from Google. The news sites have ads on them which pay their bills… so without traffic, there’s no money. This will also kill any investment into the sector because who the hell would do that?
Not that anyone uses Bing for news lol but I can see them doing the same thing, and the other smaller search engines that are out there.
I know that a lot of people these days hate on the media but the internet being controlled like this by the government is not a good move, for anyone.
Google’s blog post: https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiatives/an-update-on-canadas-bill-c-18-and-our-search-and-news-products/
