The Senate Judiciary Committee is just one vote away from dealing a necessary blow to Big Tech’s improperly inflated bottom line and to its ability to control the information people are allowed to see.
Senators will meet at 10 a.m. on Thursday and vote on the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which creates an antitrust exemption for small publishers who want to work together to make Big Tech pay them more for their content.
Google and Facebook currently exploit a monopoly in online advertising that means publishers, including the Washington Examiner, are deprived of revenues that are rightly theirs. For every dollar spent advertising online, Google and Facebook keep about half. This is why, although traffic to news sites is up 40% since 2014, their revenues are down 58%.
If small publishers are allowed to band together, Big Tech will be forced to let those who actually create news content keep more of the revenue their efforts produce.
Australia adopted a similar law last year, forcing Google and Facebook to pay news publishers over $140 million. No wonder Google and Facebook have spent millions of dollars lobbying against similar legislation here in America.
Some senators are skeptical about the bill and have raised valid concerns. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, offered an amendment this month that would prevent content moderation from being protected by the antitrust exemption. “If you’re negotiating on the ostensible harm that the bill is directed at, which is the inability to get revenues from your content, you should not be negotiating on content moderation and how you are going to censor substantive content,” he said.
We agree, as did Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), a co-sponsor of the legislation. “I don’t have any problem with that,” Kennedy said in response to Cruz. “This just makes explicit what I thought was implicit.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a lead sponsor of the bill, also agreed with the substance of Cruz’s amendment but not its exact wording. A majority of senators on the committee clearly want small publishers to be able to keep more of the revenue Big Tech takes from them and for Big Tech not to be empowered to censor the press as a bargaining tactic. Senators just need to come up with the exact language to make that clear.
We recommend that the bill specifically exclude all discussion of “curation,” “distribution,” “suppression,” “ranking,” “labeling,” and “fact checking.” No one outside Silicon Valley wants Big Tech censorship. If words such as the ones listed above are included on the list of things that cannot be bargained over, Big Tech will be unable to use this legislation to censor what publishers say.
News creators deserve to keep more of the revenue that their content generates. Google and Facebook aren’t paying journalists to ask tough questions. We also have no interest in giving Google and Facebook power over what we publish — quite the opposite.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, with an amendment making it clear that the substance of the content created by publishers is not to be bargained over, would be an important check on Big Tech abuse and power and a win for the First Amendment freedom of the press.
