How can our news media be safeguarded against the market power of domineering search engines, social media giants, and other so-called ‘big tech’ players mediating the digital economy? This is a classic public interest matter since the quality, diversity, and sustainability of publishers is of direct and immediate consequence to a user of digital news.
The numerous imbalances and fractures that scar the relationship between news publishers and technology platforms, are captured in two baskets of concerns: the absence of Fair Valuation (a matter of compensation), and that of Enumerative Accountability (a matter of transparency).
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No doubt digital advertising revenues are jointly produced by publishers and platforms. However, publishers are hampered by a fair valuation of the share of such revenues generated by their journalism. Moreover, they are entirely dependent on the terms imposed by platforms operating under monopolist or duopolistic conditions. Such dependencies arise from platforms straddling multiple roles in digital news markets, especially as mediators in the search for online news content, and as providers of infrastructure to publishers to participate in the online advertising market.
The second imbalance stems from the lack of Enumerative Accountability. Platforms unilaterally define the measures of the quality and popularity of online news; they arbitrarily change measures to suit their own priorities, often after imposing them on publishers in the first place. Further, they refuse to share relevant data on advertising and viewership with stakeholders in the news economy, including with regulators and others assessing the health of digital markets.
Mitigation
In 2021, Australia tackled this by proposing a mechanism to govern the interaction between publishers and platforms. But the platforms retaliated. Facebook blocked its Australian users from accessing thousands of news sites, which included vital sources of public information during rampant wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. They only ‘turned the news back on’ after winning major concessions from the Australian government that were enshrined in the final draft of the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, 2021.
Since then, other governments have initiated different mechanisms to fix the imbalance between publishers and platforms. Last month, Canada’s Online News Act warranted fair compensation for publishers and the sustainability of local news. The United Kingdom plans to introduce legislation to regulate the relationship between big tech and news outlets.
Even in the Global South, where publishers in some countries are vulnerable to big tech that also provide access to the online world, things are moving. While steps are underway in Brazil and South Africa, Indonesia’s proposed Digital Platform Responsibilities for Quality Journalism is set to materialise through a presidential decree. The United States, which is the home of big tech, has yet to reveal its cards. In California, the den of big tech, the Journalism Preservation Act, where platforms are obliged to pay publishers for news content, has been put on hold until 2024, despite bi-partisan support from the State’s lower house.
The vocabulary of these regulations — varied and fascinating in itself — refract different motivations and priorities. Nevertheless, their overarching aim is to correct the twin imbalances: ensure news outlets sharing their content through search engines, social media, or aggregators get a fair share of digital advertising revenues, and get visibility over the data generated by platforms from selling and distributing online news. Otherwise, news publishers will be forced to continue accepting unfair, and perhaps unsustainable, terms from platforms. They will hesitate to invest in producing high-quality journalism and ground-reportage, thereby ceding space in the digital public sphere to purveyors of misinformation and disinformation.
India’s sluggish response
Unfortunately India has been slow in thinking, talking, and acting on mitigating these twin imbalances.
In December 2021, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Technology denied in Parliament any desire to make big tech pay for news. He revised his position the next year, and in recent months has been increasingly talking about the disadvantages news publishers face in their dealings with platforms.
In 2021, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) had filed a plea against Google in the Competition Commission of India (CCI). The DNPA, which is an association of print and broadcast publishers, accused Google of unfairly valuing their digital advertising share, not remunerating them for the snippets used by Google in its search results, and unilaterally deciding and arbitrarily altering the mutually agreed revenue sharing model.
The DNPA also pointed out Google sidestepping its enumerative accountability, neither sharing granular data pertaining to advertising revenue nor disclosing the basis for calculating such revenues.
The facts presented by DNPA, relevant for most, are however not quite fruitful for evidence-based policy making. In January 2022, the CCI rightly asked its office to investigate the matter in a report to be submitted within 60 days. In February 2022, The Indian Newspaper Society (INS) filed a similar plea; it also highlighted Google’s search results not being based on the relevance of news content, thereby creating an uneven playing field among various publishers. It was no surprise that the CCI clubbed the investigations in both cases.
The report of the Standing Committee on Finance, in December 2022, on ‘Anti-Competitive Practices by Big Tech Companies’ echoed the concerns of the DNPA and the INS. It underscored that some digital markets are prone to dominance by one or two players, and within a very short span of time – that is, before policies can be formulated and anti-competitive practices are adjudged. The Standing Committee recommended the urgency of evaluating competitive behaviour before digital markets become monopolised. This is in contrast with the current practice of the ex-post, or retrospective, evaluation which is both time consuming and stretches state capacity. Had the CCI’s report been submitted on schedule, the Standing Committee would have been better informed about the imbalances between publishers and platforms. This may have even motivated it to propose more concrete policy options, or at least be less generic in its observations.
Editorial | Trust deficit: On tech platforms and news publishers
It is almost 60 weeks for the CCI report which was to have been submitted in 60 days. The imbalances harming news publishers concomitantly harm readers, listeners, and viewers of digital news. This then becomes a matter where the interests of national news outlets clearly overlap with public interest. At this moment, both these interests are in tension, if not under stress, due to the conduct of global big tech.
Vibodh Parthasarathi teaches media policy and is Associate Professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
