Level the playing field for independent media
Washington Examiner
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The rich got richer this week. Specifically, the New York Times struck a $100 million deal with Google to feature the newspaper’s content across the Big Tech company’s many platforms.
The deal will help Google maintain its monopoly position in the online advertising marketplace, which it acquired illicitly through years of questionable mergers that should have been investigated by the Federal Trade Commission but weren’t. Google will continue to use this monopoly to take half of all online advertising revenues, leaving independent and conservative news publishers without the resources they have earned and need to keep doing their jobs.
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It doesn’t have to be this way. Getting a fair deal from Google does not have to come only via a special deal for large left-liberal news outlets. Independent and conservative publishers could band together to secure a fair deal too. At present, the only impediment is Congress. If it passed a law to allow it, it would happen.
Such a law passed the Senate Judiciary Committee past year. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which fell in the last Congress but has been reintroduced by Sens. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would create an antitrust exemption for small publishers (including the Washington Examiner) to work together with other publishers to negotiate fair advertising deals with Big Tech monopolists such as Google.
The legislation also helps protect conservative and independent publishers by making it illegal for large digital platforms to discriminate or censor content they choose to regard as controversial. Platforms with over 50 million U.S.-based users would be prohibited from discussing how to “display, rank, distribute, suppress, promote, throttle, label, filter, or curate” content as part of any commercial agreement.
“Local papers are the heart and soul of journalism, and they break the news that millions of Americans rely on every day,” Kennedy said when reintroducing the JCPA last month. “However, tech giants like Facebook and Google are hammering local publications by keeping them from making a profit on Big Tech platforms — and it’s killing local journalism. This bill supports the little guy by allowing local news providers to better negotiate with tech companies for the earnings they deserve.”
When a similar law was passed in Australia a couple of years ago, Google and Facebook initially threatened to leave the country. But both Big Tech monopolists eventually negotiated with content providers and reached fair terms that provided much-needed revenues to a broad range of independent outlets.
Big Tech predations can be reined in, and independent news can be restored in this country too. All that is needed is for the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act to become law.