The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) called an inter-ministerial meeting on June 12 to initiate deliberations over a legal framework to address concerns associated with the impact of Big Tech platforms on the revenues of digital news publishers, as reported by the Hindustan Times.
According to the details shared by the Hindustan Times, the objective of the meeting is to discuss issues related to an “imbalance of bargaining power, unfair competition and sharing of advertising revenue between technology companies/intermediaries and Indian digital news publishers.” Further, the meeting is being conducted in response to the Digital News Publishers Association’s (DNPA) presentation to the Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office.
The inter-ministerial meeting is expected to be attended by the Departments of Economic Affairs, Consumer Affairs, Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, and Legal Affairs, the IT Ministry and Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and the secretary of the Competition Commission of India to discuss potential revenue-sharing arrangements between the Big Tech companies and news publishers.
Government’s support to local news publishers:
Speaking at the DNPA Conclave in February, the then I&B Minister Anurag Thakur informed that the government will soon bring in policy interventions related to digital marketing, and digital advertisement to address news publishers’ concerns about loss of revenues to Big Tech companies. Thakur termed it a big challenge that news publishers are facing:
“One issue which I could understand is they [news publishers] see a challenge as far as the revenue is concerned because a lot of money goes into the content creation, some money goes into fact-checking and as rightly mentioned, the power lies in the hand of foreign companies who work behind the wall of transparency, with the algorithms changing from time to time….so that is a big challenge.”
While the Minister dismissed the need for incentives to produce credible news, he did indicate that the government will address challenges that are beyond the scope of the publishers to resolve and support the industry with future policy interventions.
The DNPA representatives urged for policy interventions similar to Canada’s Online News Act, following which Google agreed to pay news publishers for featuring their content on its platform, and similar agreements between Google, Meta, and news publishers in Australia and France.
Further, the News Broadcasters & Digital Association (NBDA), the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), and The Indian Newspaper Society have filed complaints with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) concerning Google’s news aggregation practices. Read about DNPA’s complaint to the CCI here.
Should platforms pay news publishers for hosting their content?
According to MediaNama Founder-Editor Nikhil Pahwa, it’s not justified that platforms will have to pay publishers for hosting or linking their content for users. He adds that news publishers always had a choice to disallow web crawlers from scraping their content through options like robots.txt. News publishers have made that choice and have also leveraged Google search and social media platforms.
“Search and social are two major sources of traffic for news publishers today. But what has happened on the business side is that because most audiences are on search and social, Google and Meta/Facebook have, at some level, cannibalized revenues that were being made by news publishers online….But the fact is that all publishers have leveraged both social media and Google search to get traffic from consumers. We’ve run ads or subscriptions on our sites so that people who find us in some shape or form, either by viewing an ad or clicking on an ad and subscribing to us, will pay us. These platforms are sources of revenue for us, and we have every opportunity to prevent our content from going on those platforms.”
He added that the ‘link tax’, which demands platforms to pay for publishing a link of a creator’s content, goes against the internet’s foundational principles. This is because the internet is like a network of links that enables expansion of knowledge and a link tax will only be detrimental to access to information for users. In the context of Canada’s Online News Act, Pahwa stated that such policy measures affect freedom of speech in the sense that it creates an environment where platforms are forced to censor content because they were forced to pay for publishing links to a news article.
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