You should not have to pay to link anything. That does not mean the content of the link has to be free. However I am not about to pay $10/month each to hundreds of sites. What would make sense to be able to buy views on any site and have a proxy system distributing payment to the sites when an article is read. This would reward good/economic news sources and bad/expensive sources would get little income from this scheme. Importantly, I get to decide how much I am will to pay per month. IHO C-18 is a bad bill imposing a less than ideal solution. The problem is not with Google or Meta, its that the news orgs have not been inovative enough to come up with a solution and have and are lobbying governments to implement bad laws.