the bill c-18 deal just signed by google is not what was legislated. the legislation calls for google to make bilateral agreements with independent news organizations in order to allow them to appear in google's search results, which forces google to pay for a service it provides to news organizations for free. the actual agreement has google pay into a fund that is distributed to news organizations.

as a distant observer, my concerns were with free speech advocacy and academic freedom, which were under attack by the initial legislation. i opposed the legislation for those reasons. this agreement changes my concerns, but they do remain.

if i were google, i would want to ensure that a healthy news industry existed in canada and i would also want some influence over the news in exchange for my contributions to it's stability. that actually places google in a position where it will gain undue influence over news organizations due to the fact that it's paying them, as a result of this government dictate. it is not healthy for democracy in canada for a large corporation like google to have a cartel-like influence over the entire journalism industry, but that is what we should expect as an outcome from this agreement, the google news industry cartel that oversees google news content and which has a near monopoly on news access in canada.

i liked google's aggregate because it wasn't integrated. i may need to look elsewhere.