Facebook turned off the news in Canada. What happened next?

As owner, editor and sole reporter of Ku’ku’kwes News, Maureen Googoo starts the day by publishing her latest scoops about Canada’s indigenous communities. Tracking the number of people that flocked to read those stories used to be a pleasure. Nowadays, Ms Googoo says, she dreads it. Until last summer her website got about 12,000 monthly visits. Now it gets perhaps a quarter of that.

This is not what Canada’s government envisaged when it passed the Online News Act last June. The law promised “fairness in the Canadian digital-news marketplace”. The idea, inspired by a similar law in Australia, was to force Google and Meta, the kings of search and social media, to pay news outlets when their articles appear in search results and social feeds. Publishers and broadcasters have long complained that the tech firms have gobbled up their advertising market. The act was meant to claw some of that money back.