Google has agreed to pay Canadian news businesses $100 million a year to comply with the country’s Online News Act, despite previously saying it would remove Canadian news links from search rather than make the required payments. In June, six months before the law’s implementation, Google said it would not pay the “Link tax” and instead would remove links to Canadian news sources from Google Search and Google News for users who access the services in Canada. “Unlike search engines, we do not proactively pull news from the Internet to place in our users’ feeds and we have long been clear that the only way we can reasonably comply with the Online News Act is by ending news availability for people in Canada,” Meta told the CBC. Canadian officials previously estimated that Facebook would have to pay $62 million a year, but the deal with Google suggests that Meta could lower that amount significantly.

Source: Google to pay Canada’s “link tax,” drops threat of removing news from search