Congress this month has the opportunity to correct the asymmetrical power of Big Tech over local news publishers by passing the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
Since the earliest days of our republic, local newspapers have been critical to keeping the public informed about what’s going on in their communities and holding the powerful accountable.
That hasn’t changed in the digital age, with local news publishers adapting with the times by creating apps, newsletters, podcasts and websites to distribute the work of their newsrooms.
But what has changed over the past two decades is the growing power and influence of a handful of technology companies over who gets paid for the hard work of local journalists distributed on their platforms.
According to the California News Publishers Association, “for every dollar made in digital advertising, the platforms take as much as 70% of the revenue, leaving publishers with a scant 30%.”
We think it’s time for local news publishers to be able to negotiate, collectively, over that distribution of digital-advertising revenue. Polling by Schoen Cooperman Research has confirmed that majorities of Americans across the political spectrum agree with this commonsense idea.
That’s what the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) would make possible by providing an antitrust exemption for news publishers and broadcasters for the purposes of jointly negotiating fairer terms with Big Tech companies such as Google and Meta.
On Monday, Meta, the company behind Facebook, engaged in cynical fear-mongering against the law by announcing that passage of the JCPA could prompt the company to halt the distribution of news content on Facebook.
Don’t fall for it.
The company said the same thing about a similar law passed in Australia last year that requires social media giants to compensate news publishers for news content distributed on their platforms. They even briefly blocked the sharing of news content before reversing themselves.
The Australian government, according to Reuters, has since declared the law a success that “enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations.”
In the United States, the JCPA would benefit local publishers exclusively and impose severe penalties if the tech platforms do not negotiate with them in good faith. The bill has a limited scope of six years to address a broken marketplace, while the broader competitive landscape is fixed through other legislation and the courts.
The JCPA would also incentivize publishers to hire more journalists and protect our constitutional freedoms of speech and the press. The bill’s scope is limited to compensation and would not allow for negotiations around display of news content — it would serve only to ensure fair compensation for local news outlets. The JCPA has strict transparency requirements on the terms of each agreement reached between tech platforms and journalism providers and would establish clarity in how news outlets spend the funds they receive.
Local news publishers in the United States deserve the opportunity to negotiate for fair compensation from Big Tech companies profiting from their work. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act should be approved and signed into law.
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