But what happened next says: Australia’s measure passed — and Google and Facebook actually paid, paid Australian news companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. The Down Under news experiment prompted legislatures around the world to adopt a version of their own—a The European Union directive requires Google to forge similar agreements, most recently with France—The extent to which advocates say it is worrying Google and Facebook.
“Google and Facebook don’t want to set a precedent, they have to,” said Mike Davis, director of the Internet Accountability Project, a conservative think group that has joined libertarians in Washington. pay for content. Big technology. “These are small potatoes for them – it’s a few billion dollars, isn’t it? But it’s life or death for your hometown newspaper.”
The architects of The JCPA is motivated by a single, clear accusation: Google and Facebook are “free” reporting. It is this freedom, advocates say, that perhaps more than any other factor has sent journalism into financial collapse.
For about a decade after the Great Recession, newsrooms’ decline was attributed to the “internet”—and like encyclopedias, traditional newspapers languished in inability to adapt technological change.
But in the late 2010s, a new argument A mix of media scholars and economists: Google and Facebook are the real culprits. Together with a spacious white paper from the News Media Alliance, influencer antitrust thinker Matt Stoller may be where the most obvious explanation of this school comes from. Stoller argues that the amalgamation of factors fabricated what really caused the downfall of journalism.
The argument makes three basic points. First, news is incredibly valuable to Google and Facebook: The news snippets, links, and snippets they display help users engage with a new stream of content. In the social media factory selling your engagement to advertisers, news has become a “Commodity Input”– what is wood to build houses, or steel is to build ships – to use the metaphor of Microsoft President Brad Smith, one of the biggest supporters of the collective bargaining concept.
Second, unlike other types of content — such as streaming music and video, terrestrial radio and cinema chains, where platforms pay creators according to the economic value they earn offers — Google and Facebook do not pay to host news. (They don’t have to, thanks to important copyright decisions ruled in Google’s favor in 2007.) “We would never have expected a platform to stream movies without paying the creators,” said Representative David Cicilline, principal sponsor of JCPA at House, said in August. He added, Google and Facebook are “grasping news content to enrich their platforms but never paying for the labor and investment required to report the news”. (Disclosure: This past summer I interned on the House Antitrust Subcommittee chaired by Cicilline.)
Third, JCPA advocates emphasize that news publishers are essentially arch-rivals with Google and Facebook. Although the two tribes have a deep symbiotic relationship (note the “Share” button along with this article), at the end of the day, they also compete for the same resource — your time — that they must sell to the same limited group of advertisers. During the 2010s, just as Google and Facebook were eating up a large portion of the world’s advertising revenue, news publishers began to follow ad revenue collapses.
