The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that Google has agreed to fork over $100-million annually to the Canadian news media, in exchange for being exempted from the Online News Act, otherwise known as Bill C-18. The Globe's Andrew Coyne writes that most of the time the Canadian media manages to cover the Trudeau government's efforts to prop up the media in a manner that suggests it has anything but its own interests in mind -- you know, standing up to Big Tech. After the Google deal, that humbug is a little harder to sustain. Whatever effort there might have been to pretend there is a principled basis to the feds' attempted shakedown of Google and Facebook has officially collapsed. The shakedown is now explicit. No longer can it be pretended that the payment is in "compensation" for linking to Canadian news stories. No longer will there be the sham of negotiations between the platforms and a horde of Canadian news organizations on the exact amount of the payment, as a prelude to the CRTC imposing a deal. The future of news lies in finding and keeping willing, paying readers -- not in extorting unwilling foreign billionaires, or sponging off the taxpayers. Perhaps that is a little clearer now than it was a week ago.