Big Tech's Negotiating Bill Isn't About Google

The National's sudden change of tune has cast fresh spotlight on the rivalry between big tech companies and the news media, with Duncan Greive writing that one company should be the exception.

The National Party shocked the press last week by coming out in support of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which it inherited from Labor after winning the 2023 general election, after months of remaining somewhere between agnostic and hostile. While the bill has been a big deal for news workers and has fascinated industry players who have to pay journalists, it has been somewhat puzzling to many in the news industry, let alone those who simply consume the bill.

But throughout the bill's consideration, it has been widely perceived as being primarily about two companies: Meta and Google. This is understandable: These were the two companies Australia targeted, and their success is most closely linked to the woes of the news media, given their dominance of the vast digital advertising markets in social media and search, respectively.

The two companies have some important things in common: they both produce very little of their own content, instead making money by collating and distributing content from others – sometimes publishers, sometimes users, sometimes other organizations. Crucially, the data they gain from playing that role puts them in a very good position to sell advertising; news has always been largely funded by advertising, and the rise of search and social pipes has significantly reduced that main revenue stream.

That's the theory behind the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which is an attempt to encourage players in the digital ecosystem to strike deals to address this revenue imbalance and the loss of the societal benefit of news. The changes to allow ministers to designate companies – that is, Media Minister Paul Goldsmith will announce which companies will be covered – are in some ways an acknowledgement that this is a fluid and contested area.

Since 2021, when Australia passed the law, we have seen the rise of TikTok and an explosion of generative AI. TikTok is full of news and cultural discussions and news archives, and generative AI has been trained on a huge amount of journalism, giving it great power.

How does it work on the ground?

That’s a succinct explanation of the bill’s reasons. But what’s less well understood is the local context. Both Google and Facebook have relatively long-standing relationships with local news organizations. Those relationships began at a time when big tech companies were primarily seen as a positive, and before revenue shifts really started to hurt news organizations.

We were very close during that time. I and others from local media were flown to conferences in Singapore and Thailand, staying in nice hotels, meeting amazing people in news and tech funded by Facebook and Google. That evolved, and in 2019 Facebook funded an accelerator program, which gave us access to great mentors and senior news people who we're still close to. Google had their own program, where they sent some of their best people to run workshops for journalists.

At the same time, their platforms were evolving. They wanted to keep users with them longer and were reluctant to send them to our site where we might meet them and retain our audience. Google started populating the fields people often ask about with news article information, and zero-click searches became the largest percentage of Google searches. Facebook started favoring short-form video over news articles and stopped allowing major news articles to be boosted at all.

There was an uproar when Australia's competition authority pushed through its News Bargaining Bill, but soon both Google and Facebook struck deals with major Australian news publishers. New Zealand eventually followed suit with its own bill, pushed through by then-Media Minister Willie Jackson and ultimately taken over by his successor Goldsmith last week.

Paul Goldsmith (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images) Different Paths

But that's where Google and Facebook differ: When news broke that we wanted to collectively bargain with the tech giant, our relationship with Facebook effectively ended after one tense phone call. We lasted until the end of the audience work we were doing, but we haven't spoken much since.

The story is different with Google – they were involved in long and tough negotiations but ultimately signed a deal. We got there in the end with Stuff, but we were involved with a range of newsrooms big and small, including NZME, Newshub, RNZ, TVNZ, Newsroom, PMN and Whakaata Mori. Of course, this is not all the news media – there are some notable absentees, such as NZ Geographic.

Yet this deal covers over 1,000 journalists in New Zealand. The fate of Newshub shows that this deal alone will not save the industry. However, on behalf of The Spinoff, I believe that this deal, although confidential, makes a significant and meaningful contribution to the sustainability of the organisation. At a time of great economic uncertainty, with brands pulling back on advertising and viewers pulling back on memberships, the Google deal was a lifeline.

Our experience shows that Google has made a huge contribution to the survival of journalism in this country, so it's hard for Minister Goldsmith to essentially characterise Google as “the adult in the room” – it has voluntarily entered into agreements with many New Zealand news organisations.

The focus has been on Meta, which has not indicated it plans to do the same. In Australia, the company has indicated it will not renew any contracts it has signed in 2021, and the Albanese government is considering how to respond.

Wherever they go, New Zealand is likely to follow not only Meta, but many other big tech companies that use New Zealand news content, wrap products around it and sell advertising based on it, though most of them don't have deals with local publishers. As of last week, the government began monitoring whether they would join Google or see what lies ahead down a different route.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/08-07-2024/the-big-tech-bargaining-bill-is-not-about-google The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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