The Senate Judiciary Committee revived the prospect of a long-proposed bill that would arm print and news outlets in their negotiations with the tech giants.
The Journalism Competition and Protection Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday by a 14-7 vote.
The bill would create a “safe harbor” from antitrust laws for newspapers, broadcast stations and digital journalism outlets for a period of eight years, giving them more market power against competition for advertising from Google and Facebook. Lawmakers led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) say it is needed in the face of the decline of local journalism, which has seen scaling back newsroom coverage and overwhelming staff. deduction.
But previous efforts to pass the bill into law have stalled, most recently in December, when Facebook threatened to “consider completely removing news from our platform” rather than “follow government-mandated negotiations”. To make submissions that unfairly negate any value we provide to the news outlet.Traffic and subscriptions.
A spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company Meta cited the company’s previous statements on the law.
Legislation has also been proposed to require platforms to pay news outlets a monthly usage fee in California, which represents a percentage of advertising revenue and is determined through an arbitration process. Meta also said that if the bill passed, they would be “restricted to Facebook and Instagram instead of plonking into slush funds that primarily benefit large out-of-state media companies under the guise of helping California publishers.” Will be forced to remove the news.
more to come.