Artificial intelligence is reaching behind newspaper paywalls

There was big news in Canada last week—but if you were in Canada itself you may have missed it. On February 22nd it emerged that Google was blocking access to news content, in a five-week trial affecting about 4% of users in the country. The measure comes as Canada’s Senate considers a bill that would force big internet companies to pay publishers for displaying links to their stories. Google says it may simply block them instead; Canada’s government says the search engine’s actions amount to intimidation.It is the latest episode in a worldwide dispute between new media and old. News organisations, which in the past two decades have seen most of their advertising revenue disappear online, accuse search engines and social networks of profiting from content that is not theirs. Google and Facebook, which have come in for most of the flak, retort that they merely display links and a few lines of text, rather than articles themselves, and that by doing so they drive traffic to publishers (who in any case can opt out if they choose). Facebook estimates that it sends 1.9bn clicks a year to Canadian media, publicity it values at C$230m ($170m).