No industry has greater power over our lives today than Big Tech. Google, Facebook, and their smaller outlets (such as YouTube and Instagram) control the information we see and interact with every day.
Worse, they profit off others’ hard work, producing that information without paying creators anything.
On Wednesday, witnesses explained to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights how the current system enriches Big Tech at the expense of entities that actually produce content.
Trib Total Media President Jennifer Bertetto, whose company distributes a weekly community newspaper in southwestern Pennsylvania and operates 31 hyperlocal community websites, testified that “we carry no weight in negotiations with these two platforms.”
Bertetto explained that Google not only determines which websites to prioritize in search results, but it also then punishes publishers who use competing ad network platforms. This is classic monopolistic behavior.
“Put simply, Google and Facebook effectively impose an advertising tax on publishers,” Bertetto testified, “taking 40-70% of every ad dollar away from us. This is wrong.”
Broadcasters that survive in large part thanks to their digital presence also are victimized by Big Tech’s predatory behavior. Joel Oxley, the senior vice president of family-owned Hubbard Broadcasting, identified two ways that Big Tech steals revenue from content producers.
First, Oxley explained, Google and Facebook act as “content gatekeepers” that prevent content creators from generating traffic independent of Big Tech platforms. Second, Google and Facebook offer only a “take it or leave it” approach that leaves content creators with only a sliver of the advertising revenues generated by their content.
“Consider the big storm that just blew through the Northeast over the weekend, a nor’easter and blizzard conditions,” Oxley noted. “Tons of work at a lot of cost and time for local broadcasters to cover it for millions of people. But not for Facebook, Google, and the like. They simply take our coverage and profit from it, and virtually nothing comes back to us.”
Oxley and Bertetto both support bipartisan legislation called the Journalism Competition and Protection Act, which would allow smaller content creators such as themselves to band together and use their combined market power to force Google and Facebook to pay a fair amount for the content they don’t create but still profit from.
The model is very much like the antitrust exemption given to musicians to band together and come to terms with corporations that use their content.
Some Republicans are worried the legislation would only transfer power from liberal Big Tech companies to liberal media companies that hate conservatives, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News.
But the New York Times and Washington Post are thriving now under the existing rules. Both have turned to a subscription model, which only makes the content they produce more geared to the wealthy, far-left professionals who read them.
The real winners of the legislation would be smaller outlets, including the Washington Examiner and many of its rivals, plus the sort of local outlets that testified on Wednesday.
There is no legislation out there that would do more to take power and money away from Big Tech and return it to smaller, locally owned, and conservative outlets than the Journalism Competition and Protection Act.
