I think that's incorrect.
Listen, I think you're talking about a couple of different issues.
The first is removal of news from our platforms. We would love to restore news to Facebook and Instagram. The reason we had to remove it from our platforms is that the current government introduced and passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which was going to require us to pay approximately $80 million a year for content that had no particular commercial value to us. In fact, we think we provided great value to news publishers. We estimated there was $230 million per year to publishers in distribution value. We worked with Le Devoir, with La Presse and with publishers in Quebec across the board to distribute their content on Facebook and Instagram and get it to larger audiences. We think we were very successful in doing that.
The current government introduced legislation that gave us no option but to remove news from our platforms or we were going to have to pay for it. My colleagues at Google are currently still enmeshed with the CRTC in trying to figure out how this scheme is going to work.
We would love to restore news to our platforms. We could do that tomorrow if we were scoped out of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, if the legislation was repealed or even if publishers were given the option to opt in or opt out of that legislation. We could restore news content to our platforms tomorrow. As a Canadian, I would love to do that. I would love to see Canadian news back on our platforms. I would love to see news from Quebec back on our platforms.
We are unable to do that within the legislative framework of Bill C-18, but I think that can be fixed.