Google will follow through with its intentions to block news content from its platform when the Online News Act comes into effect.

In a blog post on Thursday morning, Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker said the company will remove links to Canadian news from its Search, News and Discover products in Canada. Though an exact date for the Act’s implementation has not been set, an amendment to the bill said it was to come into effect no longer than six months after it passed.

In addition, Google says it is now “untenable” to continue offering its Google News Showcase product in Canada. First announced in 2021, Google News Showcase is a program conducted in partnership with over 150 Canadian publishers to elevate their news content on the platform and drive more traffic to their sites. Walker said the company had linked to Canadian news stories 3.6 billion times last year, claiming that the traffic from these links is valued at $250 million.

The Online News Act is an effort by the government to force large tech companies to direct more of their revenues to news outlets, which have struggled financially under Google and Meta’s control over the ad market. Both of the tech giants had said they would remove news from their platforms should the bill pass without addressing their concerns. As the bill sought to create a mechanism for news outlets to negotiate a fair value for having their links appear on a tech company’s platform – rather than directly regulate the share of revenue an ad company’s broader ad networks commands from ads that appear on a new outlet’s own website – removing news would mean a platform no longer falls under the Act’s purview.

After the Online News Act was passed last week, Meta was quick to confirm that it would be following through with its previous plans to block news from Facebook and Instagram should the bill become law. But at the time, Google was still leaving the door open for a potential resolution with the government, with a spokesperson telling MiC that the company was “doing everything we can to avoid an outcome that no one wants.”

In his post, Walker said the company held discussions with the government last week, where it asked for clarity on how much it could expect to pay for linking to news, as well as a more clear path towards exemption from its terms through news support programs and commercial agreements with publishers.

But Walker said the government has not “provided us with sufficient certainty that the regulatory process will be able to resolve structural issues with the legislation.”

Google’s stance since the bill was introduced was that it “breaks” how web and search products work, as freely linking to content without paying to do so is a fundamental principle of the internet. The company has also expressed concerns about the bill favouring large publishers, as well as the potential for websites that do not meet journalistic standards to benefit from the Act’s financial incentives.