Google has stepped up its campaign against Canada’s Online News Act, which would force it to pay publishers for their content, by blocking certain users from accessing news.

The technology giant said its experiments would affect fewer than 4% of Canadian users – likely to mean more than one million people – and run for around five weeks. Reuters reported that Google would “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees”.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, which would also be forced to pay for news under the Online News Act, formally known as C-18, has also threatened to block content in Canada.