After Australia, Canada and France, India is now reportedly finalizing a new law that will make tech giants like Google and Facebook pay for news content appearing on their platforms.
If implemented, the proposed law would pay global tech majors such as Alphabet (owner of Google, YouTube), Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Twitter and Amazon a share of revenue to Indian newspapers and digital news publishers. will be forced to do. They earn by using original content produced by these news outlets.
The need for the law stems from the fact that tech giants earn revenue from media houses putting out news content, but they fail to share the proceeds fairly. News publishers are increasingly concerned that these digital news intermediaries have opaque revenue models that are highly biased towards themselves.
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The global battle against the abuse of its dominant position on the Internet by Big Tech has been fought. The news industries in many countries have been victims of exploitative and monopolistic practices. And now, countries are starting to look for ways to combat and prevent this menace through legislation and/or fines and penalties.
Countries such as France and Australia have introduced specific laws to provide a level playing field for their domestic news publishers while negotiating techno-commercial contracts with Big Tech. Canada recently introduced a bill that proposes to end Google’s dominance and ensure fair revenue sharing.
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These steps are not just for the benefit of media companies. Consumers will also benefit
Here’s how consumers will benefit from revenue sharing between digital platforms and news providers:
high quality news
Ensuring fair wages for the news content generated by them will provide a steady and significant revenue stream to the media houses. This revenue can be used to overhaul their digital news portals, look beyond the traffic rat race, pageviews and SEO rankings, and focus on developing high quality, diverse and accurate content for readers. could.
invest in journalists
With more money at their disposal, news establishments will be able to hire more journalists and pay their existing staff better. This will encourage better quality journalism and help publishers pay for content directly to consumers. In turn, this will reduce the reliance on digital ad streams.
check fake news
There is growing concern that platforms such as Google and Facebook benefit from fake news because of the way their algorithms are structured. For example, Google is believed to provide 48 percent of all its advertising traffic to news sites that deliver fake or misleading news. Facebook has also been accused of promoting misinformation over factual news, as seen during the 2016 US elections and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whereas traditional news media have self-regulatory mechanisms or third-party oversight over their content, Big Tech broadcasts all kinds of news with little or no oversight. A comprehensive set of reforms that reduce the incentive for misinformation would largely reign in the menace of fake news.
no cutting corner
It’s no secret that as revenue shrinks, the news industry takes shortcuts in an effort to keep business costs down. The influx of funds from digital platforms for the news they generate will enable media houses to loosen their purse strings, channel resources where they really matter and develop new, smarter, more consumer-friendly ways of disseminating news. Huh.
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