From a New York Times media column by Ben Smith headlined “Big Tech’s Domination of Journalism Is About to Change”:
It reads like a coroner’s report on the news business, 623 pages filled with charts and graphs detailing the devastating decline in local news and public policy reporting of the past decade. It landed on the Australian prime minister’s desk last summer, unnoticed by most news consumers in America and around the world.
But the report by Australian regulators left little doubt about what they see as the cause of local journalism’s demise — the near monopolistic power of Google and Facebook. And it has set off a chain of events that could shift the balance of power between big tech and the news at a dire moment for journalism.
“Global tech companies are not beyond national laws, especially when there is so much at stake,” Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and author of the report, texted me this weekend on WhatsApp.
Mr. Sims and a like-minded regulator in France, Isabelle de Silva, are challenging a universally accepted fact of the internet: that Google and Facebook can carry content created by news organizations without directly paying the organizations for creating it. Last month, as the coronavirus put hundreds of publishers out of business around the world, the Australian government instructed Mr. Sims to force the platforms to negotiate payments with newspaper publishers — making it the first country to do so. . . .
The battle between platforms and publishers is at once a matter of economic principle and an old-fashioned political brawl between powerful industries. For a decade, tech’s transformative power, glamour and enormous lobbying spending allowed it to dominate, resulting in a system in which the platforms could feature and profit off the content news publishers create without paying them directly for it. . . .
While much of the American media rejects the idea that it is crusading in its pages to support its publishers’ business agenda, most news executives in this country share a viewpoint on the platforms, having seen them pull advertising dollars from the news business and spread misinformation at the expense of professional journalism. And even as the platforms employ armies of powerful lobbyists, politicians remain eager to please the press that covers them. . . .
Facebook and Google have approached new regulatory aggressiveness differently. Facebook, after taking a huge public beating for its role amplifying misinformation and disseminating user data in the 2016 election, has moved to give publishers what they want: money, mostly. The company began its news tab last October writing checks in the seven figures to publishers in exchange for three-year licensing deals. . . .
Google has played the politics differently and, so far, much less deftly. The company has taken a patronizing approach to publishers, fronted by a gray-bearded former Salon executive, Richard Gingras, who has for years delivered the same set of talking points to increasingly irate news executives about the nature of truth and the true value of the internet — as though the year was still 2003. And while Facebook is paying publishers directly, Google has mainly handed out grants for experimental journalism projects built around Google’s technology. . . .
There are some signs that Google’s strategy is shifting. The company is in discussions with some publishers in the United States and France to pay directly to “feature full articles” on Google itself, without having to click a link, according to a Google employee who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because negotiations are in progress. . . .
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