Google is trying to "punish" Canada for bill C-18 [1]. It is absolutely gross, bully-like corporate behaviour and ultimately should earn Google much more scrutiny.

For those who don't know, bill C-18 required Google and others to pay Canadian news orgs if they scrape and present their content. This is exactly the battle Australia had with Google (Australia won, btw), but now that Canada has moved forward Google has decided to make an example for all the other mid-tier countries.

And of course C-18 has jack shit to do with BartGPT, and right now Canada has virtually zero privacy laws regarding LLMs. There is the rumblings, just as there is in every other country, and which are far more ominous and threatening in the EU, but Canada is almost always lockstep with the US on that sort of thing.

My general opinion of Google was not great -- laggardly corporation that lost most innovation and now is just riding the past -- but this sends it right off a cliff.

[1] - Google knows they can weaponize the bootlicker sorts, who have already flooded Canadian niches of the tubes to tell everyone to Leave Google Alone, and how mean the government is, etc.