A small number with an uncomfortable logic
On June 17, 2026, the CRTC issued Order 2026-136, setting the cost-recovery charge for administering the Online News Act for fiscal year 2026-27 (April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027) at a net $2.303 million — a gross estimate of $2.708 million less a $0.405 million downward adjustment carried over from the prior year, a 15.3% decrease from FY2025-26. On its face this is a rounding error next to Google's separate $100-million-a-year Online News Act compensation deal, paid out to Canadian publishers through the Canadian Journalism Collective under the five-year exemption the CRTC approved in October 2024. But the bill's significance isn't its size. It's who, alone, is paying it.
How the bill lands on one company
The Cost Recovery (Online News Act) Regulations, detailed in the CRTC's 2025-57 regulatory policy, operate on a proportional formula: each digital news intermediary's share of the Commission's administrative costs equals its news revenue divided by the aggregate news revenue of all covered platforms. That formula is neutral on paper. In practice it is not, because Meta stopped sharing news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada back in 2023 rather than negotiate under the Act, and has not resumed. With the field of participating "largest online platforms" effectively down to one, the denominator in that formula collapses to Google's own revenue — meaning Google foots essentially the entire administrative tab for a bargaining framework it is the only major platform still subject to.
Google made exactly this point during the CRTC's consultation, arguing that it was "not a rational approach" to bill 100% of enforcement costs to one entity, and calling the charge "an unfair additional regulatory burden on a company that has continued to support the news ecosystem in this country." The prior year's charge, reported by The Wire Report at $2.71 million, shows this isn't a one-off — it's a recurring structural feature of the regime, and one with no statutory ceiling built into the cost-based formula.
The steelman for cost recovery
There is a real case for charging platforms rather than taxpayers to fund the CRTC's oversight work. User-pay cost recovery is a well-established regulatory principle — the CRTC already applies it to broadcasting and telecom licensees, and securities regulators do the same with market participants. If the Online News Act creates an ongoing bargaining bureaucracy, it's defensible that the platforms whose behavior necessitated that bureaucracy should fund its operation rather than the general public. And at $2.3 million against Alphabet's scale, the sum itself is not what should worry anyone about Google's finances.
Why the structure still cuts against the law's own goals
The problem is what the formula rewards. Meta's decision to exit Canadian news distribution entirely was the more profitable move: it now pays nothing under the compensation framework and nothing under cost recovery, while continuing to operate every other product line in Canada without friction. Google, having negotiated an exemption and kept news links live, now carries both the $100 million annual compensation obligation and an open-ended, uncapped share of the regulator's overhead — a bill that grows precisely because its only potential co-payer left the table. A regime that makes compliance strictly more expensive than defection is a regime training every future platform, in Canada and in any jurisdiction eyeing a similar link-tax model, toward the Meta option.
What proportionate regulation would look like here
None of this argues for scrapping cost recovery outright. It argues for fixing the formula before it hardens into precedent for the growing list of countries drafting their own news-bargaining statutes. A defensible version would cap the annual charge, or split it between a base fee assessed on any platform meeting the "significant bargaining power" threshold in the Act — including one that renders itself exempt by blocking news — and a smaller variable component tied to actual revenue. As it stands, Order 2026-136 is not evidence the Online News Act is working as designed. It's evidence that the one company still inside the system is quietly subsidizing the enforcement apparatus built to police it, while the platform that walked away pays nothing at all.