I don't think that was ever considered seriously as a solution though. The legislation is specifically about links. If they genuinely thought that Google was stealing their content, they'd go after them for copyright infringement. I'm not going to lose any sleep over Google paying Canadian news organizations, but this whole thing is a bit of a grift. And the news organizations know it's a grift. It would be trivial for them to prevent Google from indexing them. They want those links and they need them. They make money from them -- that's why they have people on staff to do SEO. If those links are presented well, people are more likely to click them. I don't think that needs much explanation. Even on here, if someone puts in the effort to have a good headline/title, image, and summary, I'm way more likely to click on the post and click through to the article. On the other hand, the news orgs would be fools not to accept $74 million in no-strings-attached money. What's true for news organizations is also true for everyone else too though. Who among us wouldn't be foolish to walk away from tens of millions of free dollars? The next in line now gets to say, "Why them and not us?"

Even baby steps toward a pay-to-play internet are steps in the wrong direction. This might not "break the internet" on it's own but licensing links like copyrighted works is moving us along that path.