Kingston, Canada – July 2026 – The John Deutsch Institute (JDI) has released a new JDI Policy Insight paper, Making Platforms Pay for News: Policy Design and Outcomes, written by Seth Kushniryk, a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Queen’s University. The paper examines three attempts to address the same problem, that platforms profit from news content while publishers carry the cost of producing it, and considers what the outcomes suggest about how such policies should be designed.

The underlying trend is well documented. Online advertising spending in Canada is projected to reach $21.9 billion in 2025, an 80 percent increase over five years, with Google and Meta accounting for most of the growth. Over the same period Canada lost 11 percent of its print outlets, and roughly 2.5 million Canadians now live in areas served by one local news outlet or none. The three jurisdictions responded in different ways:

• Australia made bargaining mandatory but relied on the threat of enforcement rather than enforcement itself. The Treasurer retained discretion to formally designate a platform and never used it. The possibility of binding arbitration was still enough to produce roughly 30 agreements worth an estimated AUD$200 million.
• The European Union built its framework on copyright, granting publishers a right covering online uses of their content. Platforms could sidestep it by not displaying excerpts. French publishers eventually secured payment through the competition regulator, which ordered Google to negotiate and fined it €500 million.
• Canada combined the two approaches, pairing mandatory bargaining with an exemption pathway. Google took the exemption and agreed to contribute CAD$100 million annually through a collective representing more than 1,400 news businesses. Meta blocked news for Canadian users in August 2023 rather than negotiate.

The consequences of Meta’s withdrawal are the clearest evidence in the paper. Canadian outlets lost 85 percent of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and within a year 215 news organisations had stopped posting on social media altogether, 98 percent of them local. Only 22 percent of Canadians know the ban exists, so most users never sought out substitutes.

Kushniryk concludes that the credibility of the enforcement threat matters more than whether a policy is grounded in copyright or competition law, and that platforms value news differently enough that a single set of rules will not work on all of them. Kushniryk recommends:

1. Design for platform heterogeneity. Search engines depend on news and can bear mandatory arbitration, while social media platforms, where news is more easily substituted, may warrant lighter requirements.
2. Build in distributional safeguards. Specify minimum allocations for local and small publishers. In Australia, major outlets secured deals worth tens of millions while 160 regional newspapers together received under AUD$1 million.
3. Require public reporting of deal terms. Australia’s confidentiality provisions make it impossible to assess whether funds reached public interest journalism. Canada’s recipient-level disclosure offers a better model.
4. Plan for withdrawal before enacting. Identify which outlets depend most on platform distribution and prepare funding and communication strategies in advance.

Kushniryk’s broader conclusion is that bargaining codes work best alongside other measures. They can secure meaningful payments from platforms that rely on news, but they have limited reach over platforms that do not, and they offer no guarantee that funding will flow to the local journalism most at risk.

The full paper is available as JDI Policy Insight 26-0701 on the JDI website at jdi.queensu.ca.

About the John Deutsch Institute and the JDI Policy Insight series
The JDI at Queen’s University conducts rigorous, policy-relevant economic research to inform decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society. Through events, publications, and collaborations, the Institute fosters evidence-based dialogue on critical economic challenges facing Canada and the world. The newly launched JDI Policy Insight series provides balanced academic summaries of key policy issues, helping readers assess the benefits, costs, and risks of reforms and understand what we know and don’t know about policy.