Publishers long accused tech firms of profiting from their content. Now they have a point
It is the latest episode in a worldwide dispute between new media and old. News organisations, which in the past two decades have seen most of their advertising revenue disappear online, accuse search engines and social networks of profiting from content that is not theirs. Google and Facebook, which have come in for most of the flak, retort that they merely display links and a few lines of text, rather than articles themselves, and that by doing so they drive traffic to publishers .
The online platforms’ arguments have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Cheered on by their domestic press, governments in countries including Australia, Britain and Spain have passed or proposed laws aiming to squeeze money out of Silicon Valley and into local media companies. Australia’s law, passed in 2021, prodded tech firms to make payments to Australian media reportedly worth about A$200m in the scheme’s first year.
To ward off similar legislation elsewhere, Google and Facebook have set up mechanisms for funnelling “support” to media companies. Google’s “News Showcase” will spend about $1bn in 2020-23 on licensing content from more than 2,000 news organisations in more than 20 countries. Facebook’s News Tab does something similar, but has lately been scaled back. Unlike Google, Facebook can live without news, which makes up only 3% of what users see in their feed.
The laws have sometimes had the feel of a shakedown of the wealthy foreign tech firms by governments. But developments in the search business mean that the publishers’ complaints seem increasingly justified. Search engines have been getting better at displaying information without referring visitors to external sources. Ask Google the size of Canada’s population and it simply tells you that it was 38m in 2021 .
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