Breaking Google's Stranglehold Over the News Industry - Journalism Competition and Preservation Act
This is an interesting snippet from the Washington Examiner about a bipartisan piece of legislation that is aimed at removing monopoly powers over the news industry and forcing them to negotiate with small / local news agencies regarding advertising rates.
I haven't had a chance to read this legislation in its draft form, but this article does discuss some of the aspects of it if you'd like to learn more.
Check out this snippet and scroll to the bottom for a link to the full article:
Who do you trust more: your local newspaper or Google content moderators in California?
If you trust people living in your community more than out-of-touch, woke engineers living in Silicon Valley, then you should support the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which will be voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee next month.
Google is one of the most powerful businesses on Earth. It controls what news you see and when you see it. It did not become this powerful by playing fair.
When Google bought an online advertising company called DoubleClick in 2007, it already had a monopoly in search, but it hadn’t until then figured out how to turn that monopoly into profits. By inserting itself as a middleman between online advertisers and publishers, however, Google was able to leverage its search monopoly into an online advertising monopoly as well.
Today, Google and Facebook capture about 60% of all online advertising revenue. For every dollar spent, they keep about half. This means that when Dave’s Donuts spends $1,000 to advertise in the online version of the Dayton Daily News, Google gets $500 and the paper gets $500.
Google creates none of the local news you consume, but it gets half the revenue. This is one reason why so many local papers have died. It is also why, although traffic to news sites is up 40% since 2014, revenue for news sites is down 58%.
A bipartisan coalition from across the ideological spectrum, including Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), John Kennedy (R-LA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), as well as Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO), Burgess Owens (R-UT), David Cicilline (D-RI), and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), has come together with legislation that will help neutralize Google’s online advertising monopoly and force the company to play fair.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would create a temporary antitrust safe harbor for small publishers, including the Washington Examiner, to work together and negotiate a fair advertising deal with Google and Facebook. This sort of arrangement has already been put in place elsewhere (for example, in Australia). Large publications with more than 1,500 employees, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, would not be given this exemption.
Google and Facebook spend no money creating the news content that users see on their sites. They completely depend on content creators for their revenue. If news creators were allowed to cooperate and demand higher prices for the news they produce, Google and Facebook would have to pay for what they get.
Read the full article at the link below.
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LINK:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/make-big-tech-play-fair
