Big Tech is bluffing.

So goes the accepted wisdom regarding Google’s and Meta’s recent declarations that they would pull their news services out of the country should the federal government adopt Bill C-18, or the Online News Act. 

With this legislation, the government wants to compel Big Tech to pay for the news posted to its platforms. Big Tech doesn’t want to do this. Google, no fan of the legislation, recently throttled Canadian news to some users for five weeks. Asked for comment, the company told me it was to “explore potential impacts” should the Online News Act become law. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it would rather block access to news on its platforms than comply with legislation it argues is “neither sustainable nor workable,” as Meta Canada spokesperson Lisa Laventure put it to me in an email.

There is good reason to think both companies are posturing—Meta in particular. After all, the company threatened to do the same when the Australian government tabled a similar bill in 2020, only to blink when the legislation was all but a fait accompli. This conspicuous climbdown, and the resulting bevy of deals the company struck to give money to Australian news outlets, was a strong indication that for all its rattling of sabres, Meta could still be cowed by legislation from the world’s governments. Certainly, Canada’s federal government thinks as much: “This tactic didn’t work in Australia, and it won’t work here,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said recently.  

Not everyone agrees. “I think Facebook and Google determined that Canada is a tipping point that they don’t want to cross, and they’ve decided it’s worth risking a significant reputational hit by blocking news content here in order to show other countries they aren’t bluffing,” as the academic and noted critic of Big Tech Taylor Owen told me recently.

The jury is out on Google, as I’ll explain in a minute. But I definitely don’t think Meta is bluffing this time. After conversations with several well-placed sources in the publishing industry, I think there’s a very good chance that the company will cease distributing Canadian news on its platforms should the legislation pass. Here’s why.

As its corporate name change from Facebook to Meta suggests, in 2023 it is a very different company than it was even circa 2020. That year, in a bid to counter its image as a global vector of democracy-subverting misinformation, the company became journalism’s best friend. It announced US$100 million in support for news outlets during COVID-19, US$25 million of which came from the Facebook Journalism Project, created in 2017. Kevin Chan, then head of public policy for Canada at Facebook, was a ubiquitous presence on panels about the future of news media—themselves often stocked with Facebook-subsidized news outlets.

Three years and one expensive pivot to the ill-defined metaverse later, the company’s appetite for news has clearly slackened. It has ceased using humans to curate its news tab, shuttered its Substack-competing newsletter subscription service and, critically, announced it would stop paying U.S. news publishers for their content to run on Facebook. It also laid off a whack of people working on its various journalism initiatives—some of the 21,000 people the company has laid off since last November.

Then there’s the matter of proximity. Canada is glued to the U.S., geographically if not culturally; as such, it presents a bigger threat, precedent-wise, than Australia. Acquiescing to Canada’s Online News Act would weaken Meta’s position in its own negotiations with the U.S. government, which is considering its own pay-for-news legislation—as it would in Brazil, United Kingdom, South Africa and Indonesia, all of which are considering similar legislation.

“I don’t think this is a bluff for Facebook, given how the company has behaved over the last few years,” said Quebec Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, who is studying the Online News Act as it meanders through the country’s chamber of sober second thought. The senator, it must be said, is a Trudeau-appointed member of the Independent Senators Group and a Big Tech critic who wants C-18 to pass, in large part because she believes the future of much of Quebec’s media depends on it. “For some, it’s a question of survival,” she told me.

The group of publishers looking to C-18 to help their bottom line, if not ensure their survival, is substantial. Under the proposed law, between 450 and 500 news organizations would qualify to enter into collective bargaining with Meta and Google, according to Heritage Canada estimates. Taken together, this group represents a massive Canada-centric content ecosystem comprised both legacy players and digital upstarts, like the one that pays my salary. 

Meta is eyeing a future in the metaverse. These days Facebook is more marketplace than news source. Google, on the other hand, remains the would-be indexer of everything under the sun. It is more beholden to Canada’s news spigot. In the conversations I’ve had over the last week with publishing executives and others involved in this file, the consensus was that Google is far more invested in having Canadian news on its platforms than Meta. Even if Meta follows through on its threat to block news, Canada’s news media organizations are still betting Google will back down. 

They have a lot riding on that bet. In a conversation last week, Globe and Mail publisher Philip Crawley outlined the potentially devastating fallout to the news industry were Google to deindex and cease offering Canadian news. “In Canada, the ad industry is built around Google at the moment,” Crawley told me. Not having access to Google search, he added, “would be really damaging for our audience reach.” 

For the record, Crawley is another who doesn’t think Meta’s threat is a bluff. But he remains in favour of the bill regardless, though he takes issue with aspects of it. He told me he had “serious concerns about CRTC overreach” embedded in the current iteration of the bill, referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the governmental body that would oversee negotiations between news media entities and Big Tech. (I should also note that The Globe has signed deals that see both Google and Meta paying it undisclosed sums in exchange for its content appearing on their platforms. The Logic has signed no such deals.)

If losing Big Tech would be bad for The Globe, arguably the country’s most recognized private news publisher, it would be outright devastating for titles without the paper’s brand recognition and promotional heft. Big Tech may well be a vampire squid sucking the news industry dry of advertising dollars. Nonetheless, this squid is particularly effective at getting the industry’s content in front of eyeballs. Even with that risk, my queries to assorted legacy publishers reveal they remain more or less solidly in favour of C-18. 

If Google blinks, and the licensing money flows, they may still come out ahead, even if news vanishes from Facebook and Instagram, as seems increasingly likely. For better or worse, Meta and much of Canadian media may be deciding they’re better off without each other. The big publishers are at least willing to make that bet—at least until they decide it’s time to pivot to the metaverse.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin