WDo you trust more: your local newspaper or Google’s content moderators in California?
If you believe in the out-of-touch people in your community, the woke engineers who live in Silicon Valley, you should support the Journalism Competition and Protection 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. In fairness it wasn’t that powerful.
When Google bought DoubleClick, an online advertising company, in 2007, it already had a monopoly on search, but it didn’t figure out how to turn that monopoly into profit until then. But by positioning itself as an intermediary between online advertisers and publishers, Google has also leveraged its search monopoly into an online advertising monopoly.
Today, Google and Facebook account for about 60% of all online advertising revenue. For every expense, they account for about half. That’s when Dave’s Donuts spent $1,000 to advertise its online version. Dayton Daily News, Google gets $500 and the paper gets $500.
Google creates none of the local news you consume, but gets half of the revenue. This is one reason many local papers have died. Although traffic to news sites has increased by 40% since 2014, news sites’ revenue has decreased by 58%.
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-NI) have come up with legislation to end Google’s online ad monopoly and force the company out of business. fair play.
The Journalism Competition and Protection Act creates a temporary antitrust safe harbor for small publishers; Washington Detective, To work together with Google and Facebook and negotiate a fairer advertising agreement. This type of arrangement has already been put in place elsewhere (eg in Australia). Large publications with more than 1,500 employees, such as New York Times and the Washington Post, This is not free.
Google and Facebook don’t spend any money creating the news content that users see on their site. They are completely dependent on content creators for their income. If news creators were allowed to cooperate and charge higher prices for the news they produce, Google and Facebook would have to pay for what they get.
Such an antitrust safe harbor already exists in the music industry. Musicians are allowed to collectively bargain with radio stations and entertainment venues to ensure they receive fair compensation for their work and creativity. Newsmakers need and should be free of the same.
Some lawmakers say the law would create a news cart monopoly as bad as Google’s. But the law specifically sets aside some money for small and new innovators from any deals signed with Big Tech companies. Publishers are prohibited from excluding anyone from the negotiations for ideological reasons.
The power that Google has amassed over the news industry should be of particular concern to conservatives. In 2020, Google and its employees gave 94% of their political donations to Democratic candidates. This company conservatives need to control what news people can see. Why Republicans like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy want to protect Google’s monopoly power by opposing this legislation is perhaps a mystery. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that his district is in California.
Newsmakers, the Washington detectiveThe bill would get more money from the revised arrangement that would come into effect. Google will earn somewhat less than they do now, but it will have a better business relationship based on mutual benefit rather than predatory behavior.
The Journalism Competition and Protection Act puts news content creators on a level playing field with Big Tech. For the first time in decades, Big Tech had to play fair.
