This is the result of the Canadian government giving in to the lobbying from the media conglomerates instead of actually addressing the real problem.

The real problem is the Facebook / Google advertising duopoly. The fix would be to break up that duopoly. Instead, they tried to create a “link tax” so that any time Google / Facebook linked to a news article (for select lucky news corporations) they had to pay for that link. The obvious response from Facebook / Google is “ok, we won’t link to Canadian news then”.

Now, instead of Google / Facebook getting ~30% of the cut from news-related advertising, they get 0%, but because there’s no traffic, the media conglomerates get 0% too. It doesn’t really hurt Google / Facebook. If your feed / search would have included breaking news but now includes a cute cat video instead, they get their cut from that cat video and are just as happy.