A bipartisan bill to make Google and Facebook pay news companies whose stories appear on their platforms to help the struggling media industry faced its first test in the state Senate Tuesday evening when it passed 9-2 out of the Judiciary Committee.
If approved by the Senate and signed into law, Google and Facebook either would have to agree to pay negotiated annual, lump-sum fees into a fund for news outlets, or be forced into mediation or arbitration to negotiate paying a share of their digital-ads revenue.
“News outlets have downsized and closed at alarming rates,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who introduced the California Journalism Preservation Act, said at Tuesday’s hearing. As news moved online and major internet platforms gained broad reach, publishers were required by circumstance to allow their content onto the platforms, she said, with “little to no compensation.”
The bill, co-authored by assembly members Bill Essayli, a Riverside Republican, and Josh Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, passed the state Assembly in June 2023.
Supporters include a number of news publishers and organizations including the California Broadcasters Association and the California News Publishers Association, to which the Bay Area News Group belongs.
“This is critical for the future of our industry and our democracy,” said Brittney Barsotti, a lawyer for the California News Publishers Association. “There’s so much misinformation and polarization out there that having quality journalism is necessary.”
In addition to Google and Facebook, opponents include the ACLU of California, the California Taxpayers Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and some online news organizations, including CalMatters.
Google’s vice-president of global news partnerships Jaffer Zaidi argued to the committee that the bill rested on a “flawed premise” that internet platforms grab news for profit without compensation. Google Search sends “billions of visits” daily to websites of news publishers of all sizes, giving them “valuable free traffic,” Zaidi said.
Jeff Jarvis, a retired journalism professor who wrote a report on the bill for one of its chief critics, the California Chamber of Commerce, told the committee Tuesday he feared it would benefit national media conglomerates, newspaper-owning hedge funds, and “extremist and propaganda media.” The bill is probably unconstitutional, he said, calling it “a tax on reading.”
Chamber of Progress, a group backed by Google, Facebook and other large technology companies, pointed to Canada as an example of potential fallout from the bill, after many publishers north of the border lost traffic when Meta, faced with such a law, stopped carrying news on Canadian Facebook. Small outlets have been hit hardest, according to the group.
Meta, which earned $135 billion in revenue last year, on Tuesday repeated an earlier threat that it would “be forced to make the business decision of ending the availability of news in California” if the bill passed. “The vast majority of people don’t come to Facebook and Instagram for news and political content,” Meta said in a statement, calling the news on its platforms “something that does not generate significant value for our users or our business.”
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Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
