CTV News confirmed that the Canadian government will announce today, Wednesday, that it has reached an agreement with Google regarding the Online News Act known as C-18.

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge is scheduled to reveal the details of the deal during a press conference for ET at the Parliament building at 1:30 PM, and the agreement is expected to see the tech giant continue sharing Canadian news content, in return Google will make annual payments to news companies totaling around $100 million.

Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, establishes a framework requiring digital giants Google and Meta to develop agreements with Canadian news sites to compensate them for hosting their journalistic content on their platforms.

When the bill was passed in June, both Google and Meta took the stance that instead of compensating media organizations, they would block Canadian news from their platforms.

Meta has managed to resist this threat this summer, and continues to ban content from Canadian news platforms on Facebook and Instagram, despite political and public pressure to reverse course.

Google indicated that except for proposed amendments to federal regulations supporting the new rules, the search giant will follow suit and remove links to Canadian stories from its search and other products when the legislation comes into effect on December 19.

The tech giant expressed concern about "serious structural issues with C-18 which unfortunately were not addressed during the legislative process," describing the bill as a "link tax" that "breaks the way the internet and search engines have worked for over 30 years," and could expose them to "unlimited financial liability."

The news media lobbying group says Google's concerns about the Online News Act are valid, and earlier this year, the federal government set an estimated price for the amount Google must spend - $172 million as an annual compensation to meet the proposed exemption criteria.

St-Onge took over the controversial portfolio from her predecessor and bill sponsor Pablo Rodriguez after a cabinet shuffle in July, where she has been seen taking the lead in recent months in online news negotiations with platforms.