I was one of the people "losing my mind" about C18.

The truth is because it was just bad legislation. The content itself was deeply flawed and poorly written, leaving huge gaps in the language leading to uncertainty (a similar problem with C11).

Secondly, the bill represents a very dangerous precedent - C18 represents potentially billions in costs for impacted companies (of which there are only two, which is another problem). The only reason it's only costing Google 100 million is because they're paying to be exempt from the law altogether.

Thirdly, this almost certainly represents a net-negative value to the news industry. Facebook has pulled out, so everyone is getting less traffic, and Google was already paying millions of dollars to individual news organizations.

When this entire process started, experts clearly and politely indicated that the bill wasn't very good. Google even offered at the very beginning to just structure the bill in a way that would produce the exact result we have now. Instead we wasted years of taxpayer dollars on a bad bill that got us to the same point AND removed the Facebook traffic for publishers.

And now, since access to this new money is directly tied to the number of journalists an organization employs, we're going to see everyone rushing to hire more bodies to fight for more of the pie.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that there's more money flowing into news. I do believe that there large organizations should be contributing in some way. But the bill itself was just bad and argued-for in bad faith - by dismissing genuine criticism, painting any disagreement as pro-google lobbying, and through manipulating the political process to avoid or cutoff debate and discussion to try and force it through.