Steve Saretsky

Google said similar kinds of things, but their issue was always a little bit different, in part because they, of course, were proactively indexing the news to try to get the best possible search results.

And so in the end, they negotiated a deal with the government where they

are paying $100 million a year.

That's a decent chunk of change.

But if you subtract what's been lost from Meta, including the license deals they had, and you exclude the license deals that Google had before, it's not as much new money as one might have anticipated.

So that's where we're at.

Sort of a bit of a heads up about where we may be going.

We modeled our law on an Australian law that tried to do much of the same thing.

Meta has said that they will no longer pay for news links in Australia, much like the situation in Canada.

And Australia has proposed responding with just a straightforward tax.

They say, we're going to tax, I believe it's 2.25% or 2.5% of your revenues in the country and have that money transferred over to news.

So if this goes ahead, they've given up even the pretense of saying this is about any sort of compensation.

It's just a straightforward tax to cross-sectorize a news sector.

To shake down.

Exactly what it is.

That's all it is.

I mean, and they are now straightforward about saying it's not about links.

It's now about the fact that much advertising has moved from those traditional media to the digital space.

Well, in the Australian instance, I think it's probably as it's primarily they would, if pressed, they would acknowledge that Rupert Murdoch happens to be the press baron in Australia and Rupert Murdoch would like to get paid.

And so that's a pretty powerful position to be in.