Last Updated on 20/02/2021 by Khushi
As per Rep. Ken Buck who is the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, the Bipartisan members of Congress are planning to introduce a bill that will make it easier for the smaller and new organisations to be able to negotiate with the Big Tech platforms. The decision is likely to be finalised in the coming weeks.
Australia is already caught up in a battle with the leading tech giants Facebook and Google and so far, the battle has been inconclusive. The social media giants then took it a step further by doing what they had threatened Australia about, blocking news feeds and other pages which also includes charity, health and other emergency related services.
Buck stated that there would be a series of antitrust bills that will come into effect steadily, the first of it being the one to be passed in the coming week. The bill would allow small scale and new organisations to negotiate with tech giants who use news to garner customer attention but are accused of not sharing enough of the revenue generated from advertising with the news publishers. Thereby, the newly formed legislative bill could induce steady growth in the struggling news business.
Unlike Google, that has got into agreements with France, Australia and other countries, Facebook on the other hand, has continued to fight with the publishers.
In this past week, Google landed itself into an agreement with the News Corp that includes “significant payments” being made to the news organisations.
The up and coming legislative bill would be similar to the 2019 bill that was co-sponsored by panel chair Rep. David Cicilline, said Buck.
Smaller publishers using Google’s ad sales technology have for years griped about their bigger competitors getting more favorable revenue-sharing deals from the search giant.
The bill favoured the small publishers for being able to take advantage of the group negotiation.
Back in October, a report by the antitrust sub committee’s majority made claims of the tech giants abusing their power in an attempt to generate more revenues and gain control over the entities in the same arena.
“What publishers have experienced is that platforms go to them one by one, make them sign NDAs and try to optimize per publisher without publishers being able to compare notes,” said David Chavern, president and chief executive officer of the News Media Alliance, an industry trade group that is promoting the bill. (Source: Reuters.com)
“The biggest threat to the free market economy is big tech and it (potential legislation) should be fairly tightly focused on that,” Buck said. (Source: Reuters.com)