USA: Advances law for big tech to pay newspapers for content – 02/06/2023 – Market

A bill that obliges technology platforms like Google and Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) to pay journalism companies for the content provided to their users advanced in the Legislature of the US state of California on Thursday (1st).

The California Journalism Preservation Act, as it was christened, establishes a “journalism usage fee” that big techs must pay to media outlets, and requires that at least 70% of the proceeds from the new fee be invested in the job creation in the sector.

The bill passed the Assembly and now heads to the state Senate. If approved, it will go to Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom for signature. The project has support in the Legislative and was approved with a large majority in the Assembly, with 46 votes in favor and 6 against.

“Allowing publishers to receive a fair market value for content used by others will preserve and ensure the sustainability of local and diverse media,” says the approved text.

The measure has great weight in California, as it is the state where the headquarters of large technology companies are located, but there is also a similar project being discussed in the US Congress, the Law of Competition for the Preservation of Journalism, which if approved will make the big techs pay for content usage across the country.

The California project “shows that Americans understand the importance and value of journalism in keeping their communities safe and informed and ensuring the accountability of those in power,” Danielle Coffey, president of the News/Media Alliance, said in a statement. which represents nearly 2,000 American newspapers.

Tech companies reacted. Meta stated that if the bill passes in the state, the company “will be obligated to remove news from Facebook and Instagram, instead of paying into a secret fund that mainly benefits large out-of-state media companies under the guise of help California publishers,” he said in a statement.

This has already been done in other places where similar laws have been passed in recent years. In Australia, for example, a pioneer in the adoption of this model, Facebook and Google removed news links from their platforms immediately after the new regulation, in March 2021.

The government took the field, however, and the big techs made a deal with the newsrooms, which in the first year alone yielded 200 million Australian dollars (R$ 656 million) for journalistic companies, according to the magazine Columbia Journalism Review. In the country, up to 30% of salaries in the sector are paid with resources from the large platforms.

The same happened in Canada, when Google blocked news from search results pages in February this year. Meta also announced that it will do the same.

The payment to journalistic companies is an attempt to solve the crisis of the professional press business model, mainly caused by the hegemony of big techs in the advertising market. The premise is that internet platforms gain relevance and profit by displaying journalistic content without paying anything for it and should share the result with media companies.

In Brazil, the PL (bill) of Fake News included payment by platforms for the journalistic content used, but amid obstacles and strong opposition from big techs, deputies withdrew the remuneration of the text under discussion in the Chamber, to try to approve it later in another separate project.