It's not healthy for news outlets to depend on being subsidized. Or, more accurately: it's not healthy for every news outlet to be subsidized by the same source, especially in this sorta roundabout way that can be pulled out from under them with a single decision by Google. If I've come to one conclusion about professional news in the last 25 years, it's that they need to control their source of revenue and not depend on being a vassal of big tech. Our ability to get quality journalism shouldn't require a FAANG company to provide the necessary resources; not distribution, not editorial, not financial.
This tax applies only to Google. It doesn't apply to any other tech company, and it never will. The DMA at least provides more-or-less objective criteria for what constitutes a "gatekeeper", but this is literally a private deal between Canada and Google.
I don't have a problem with publishers getting a greater share of ad revenue, but there are better ways to do it. The govt could increase taxes on ad exchanges categorically (still effectively a tax on Google and Facebook) and give publishers tax breaks. That would have the same effect but be way more reasonable.
It applied to Facebook/Meta and any larger social media sites. Meta just shut it down and any direct contributions to journalism that they were making, and now the publishers are crying because their traffic has plummetted, to the surprise of precisely nobody except them.
Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.
Google offered News Showcase, where they paid participating orgs for quality content curated by professional editors. They were paying $25 million a year to Canadian journalists. That program is now not available in Canada. Facebook had a similar program of the same scale that they also pulled.
No link tax, just a tax for news.
Sounds... reasonable?