Canada's first big election with a news blackout on Facebook. From American Public Media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Canada's Liberal Party and its leader Mark Carney are set to remain in control after the country held federal elections Monday.

They were the first since Canada adopted the Online News Act in 2023.

The law requires online content providers like social media platforms to negotiate

some sort of fair payment to news publishers in exchange for using their content. Or they can just do

what meta did, block all news from their Facebook and Instagram platforms altogether. We spoke with Marketplace senior Washington

correspondent Kimberly Adams, who's reporting from Canada, to learn more about that law and what happened

to the online news environment after it passed. So this was a 2023 law that would require social

media platforms and other online content providers to either negotiate deals

to pay news publishers for their content or to pay some kind of fee that arbitrators would help

set.

And this was mainly going after Meta and Google, and they lobbied hard to stop the bill, but it

ultimately became law.

Now, this law was Canada's attempt to support its news

industry, ideally by forcing these big tech companies to share some of the money they make when

users share news articles, because just like here in the U.S., that industry, the news industry,

has been struggling for years. And so how did these tech platforms respond to this law?

I asked Dwayne Winsack, who teaches journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. He's also

director of the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project there, and he talked about two

different responses. Google came to the table, and it made an agreement with the Canadian government to provide

$100 million per year into a fund that will be distributed by a third-party consortium to news media

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