As Australia, Canada and France, now India is reportedly putting the final touches to a new piece of legislation that would make tech giants like Google and Facebook pay for the news content they display on their platforms.
If this rule implement, the propose law would compel global tech majors such as Alphabet, owner of Google, YouTube and Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Twitter, and Amazon to pay Indian newspapers and digital news publishers a share of the revenue they earn by using original content produce by these news outlets.
The need for the law stems from the fact that while the tech giants earn revenue from putting up news content from the media houses, they fail to share the earnings fairly.
For news publishers, there has a growing concern that these digital news intermediaries have opaque revenue models, heavily biase towards themselves.
There has a global fightback against Big Tech’s abuse of its dominant position on the internet.
The news industries in many countries have victims of exploitative and monopolistic practices.
And of now, countries are starting to look for ways to tackle and curb the menace through legislation and/or fines and penalties.
Countries like France and Australia have introduce specific laws in order to provide a level playing field for their domestic news publishers while negotiating techno-commercial contracts with Big Tech.
Canada has recently brings a Bill that proposes to end Google’s dominance and ensure fair revenue sharing.
These moves are not just for the benefit of the media companies.
Even consumers will benefit.
How Revenue Sharing between Digital Platforms and News Providers will benefit consumers?
High Quality News
Securing a fair pay for the news content they generate will provide a steady and significant revenue stream for the media houses.
This revenue can be utilise to overhaul their digital news portals, look beyond the rat race of traffic, pageviews and SEO rankings and focus on developing high quality, varied and accurate content for the readers.
Investment for Journalists
Having more funds at their disposal will enable news establishments to hire more journalists and pay their existing employees better.
As this will incentivize better quality journalism and also help publishers start getting consumers to pay directly for content.
And this will reduce reliance on digital advertising streams.
Fake News
There has been a growing worry that platforms such as Google and Facebook profit off fake news because of the way their algorithms are structure.
Google is believe to serve 48% of all its ad traffic to news sites that peddle fake or misleading news.
Facebook has accuse of ending up promoting misinformation over factual news, as was seen during the 2016 US elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
As traditional news media have self-regulatory mechanisms or third party oversight over their content, Big Tech channelizes all kinds of news with little or no oversight.
A sweeping set of reforms that reduces incentives for misinformation will reign in the menace of fake news to a great extent.
No Cost Cutting
It is no secret that as revenue shrinks, the news industry takes shortcuts to keep the cost of business low in an effort to remain afloat.
An cut of funds from digital platforms for the news they generate would enable media houses to loosen their purse strings, channel resources where they really matter and develop newer, slicker, more consumer-friendly ways of disseminating news.
