A Bill With One Payer
On 17 June 2026, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued Order 2026-136, setting the Online News Act cost-recovery charge for fiscal year 2026-27 at a net $2.303 million — a 15.3% decrease from the $2.719 million billed for 2025-26. The charge recovers the Commission's own administrative and enforcement costs for running the Act, separate from any money that flows to news publishers. In principle, it applies to "operators of the largest online platforms that make news content available in Canada." In practice, it applies to exactly one company: Google.
That is not an accident of drafting. It is the direct, foreseeable result of how two platforms responded to the same law, and it is worth examining what that says about the Online News Act's design.
The Steelman
The Online News Act (Bill C-18), which received royal assent in June 2023, responds to a genuine problem: the bargaining relationship between news publishers and dominant platforms has long been opaque and lopsided. As Taylor Owen of McGill's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy has argued in an analysis for Tech Policy Press, platforms had cut individual deals with some publishers — never all — with terms hidden behind non-disclosure agreements, leaving smaller outlets with no leverage at all. A collective bargaining framework, in theory, lets publishers negotiate as a bloc and directs support toward journalism employment (measured by full-time equivalent staff) rather than toward whichever outlet already commands the biggest audience. That is a defensible goal, and Canada's newsroom closures over the past decade are real.
Where the Design Breaks Down
The problem is what happened when the law actually took effect. Google negotiated an exemption: under CRTC Decision 2024-262, issued 28 October 2024, Google avoids mandatory bargaining in exchange for contributing $100 million annually, indexed to inflation, to the Canadian Journalism Collective for five years. Meta took the opposite path. Rather than negotiate or pay anything, it blocked news content entirely on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users — a decision Meta's Nick Clegg framed as forfeiting roughly $230 million worth of free referral traffic it had been sending publishers, according to reporting from Search Engine Journal. Google, with roughly 92% of Canadian search traffic, initially threatened the same move before settling on the payment deal instead.
The consequence is a regulatory structure that now taxes compliance and exempts exit. Google pays $100 million a year into the journalism fund and now also covers effectively the entire $2.3 million cost of the regulator that administers the Act — a bill that, structurally, existed only because Google agreed to participate. Meta, having simply removed the product feature the law targets, owes the CRTC nothing and funds no journalism at all. Canadians lost access to news links on two of the country's most-used platforms, and the law's only durable financial yield is a shrinking fee levied on the one company still in the room.
This is not a case for scrapping oversight of dominant platforms outright — cost-recovery regimes for regulators are ordinary practice, and a 15.3% year-over-year decline suggests the CRTC's Online News Act workload is not spiraling. But a compensation scheme whose entire tax base is a single voluntary participant is not a stable one. It also front-loads a strange incentive: any third platform Canada tries to bring into scope — even a much smaller one — will look at Meta's outcome and Google's, and there is only one obviously rational choice between them.
The Bigger Risk
Owen's own critique of the Act, made in the same analysis, is instructive here: the law's aggregate-only reporting to regulators means Canadians cannot see the actual terms Google negotiated, and there is a real risk that journalism funding becomes structurally dependent on a small number of tech companies and government appropriations rather than sustainable revenue models. A fee schedule that only Google pays, funding both journalism grants and the regulator that oversees them, is a narrower version of the same dependency — with the added irony that the platform being taxed is the one that chose not to walk away.
Canada does not need to abandon the goal of correcting bargaining imbalances in digital news markets. But a framework where the sole remaining obligor is also the one exercising restraint by staying in the system is worth revisiting before Ottawa expands its ambitions to streaming, AI, or other sectors using the same model.