In the wake of Google’s deal with the federal government to support Canadian news organizations, one expert is suggesting big tech companies are starting to see the writing on the wall. 

On Wednesday, the federal government announced it reached a deal with Google under the Online News Act to cap payments made to Canadian news organizations at $100 million, down from the original proposal of $172 million. 

While Meta chose to block news content from its products, Richard Lachman, associate professor at the RTA School of Media at the Toronto Metropolitan University, believes Google may have been more inclined to make a deal.

“I do think the tech companies are realizing there’s an inevitability to this,” he told BNN Bloomberg in a television interview Wednesday.

“(Google) knew it was coming. There was going to be governments saying: ‘Hey, we need to actually support other sectors and social value here, the question is going to be how much.’”

Lachman said it remains to be seen how the money will distributed between media organizations and whether it will just go towards journalists, or other positions within media as well.

“We don’t yet know how that money’s going to be spent and an unnamed organization is going to be in charge of negotiating with Google to determine that,” he said. “We don’t know what that organization is yet, so there’s more details to come.”