The day after Meta threatened to pull news from Facebook, Congress dropped its proposed journalism legislation to get tech platforms like Facebook and Google to pay for news. The goal of the Journalism and Competition Preservation Act was to give media organizations the power to collectively negotiate with Facebook and other social media platforms.
On December 5, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called the proposed bill “an ill-considered journalism bill” that disregards the role social media platforms play in connecting readers with their favorite news outlets. Stone also said the company would be “forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions.”
“Put simply: the government creating a cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private entities is a terrible precedent for all American businesses,” Stone added in a tweet.
The Washington Post reports that Congress removed the proposed language from a broad annual defense-spending bill the next day. The bill, which had bipartisan support, would have created a four-year safe harbor from anti-trust laws for print, broadcast, and digital news outlets to negotiate with social media platforms where their news appears.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who introduced the bill on March 10, 2021, was opposed to removing the language from the defense-spending bill, The Post says. She believes the bill is necessary to preserve small, local journalism outlets. Such outlets need to be able to compete in the online marketplace, reports CNN.
“Continually allowing the big tech companies to dominate policy decisions in Washington is no longer a viable option when it comes to news compensation, consumer and privacy rights, or the online marketplace,” Sen. Klobuchar said in a statement. “We must get this done.”
Meta wasn’t the only one fighting the bill, according to Roll Call. A trade group called NetChoice which represents Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok and Yahoo, broadcast a six-figure, 30-second TV and digital ad opposing the legislation. It targeted “Washington liberals” whom they accused of wanting to “silence conservative voices.” Two dozen other groups banded together to write to Congress to speak against the bill including Public Knowledge, a free-speech advocacy group, American Civil Liberties Union, Local Independent Online News, the Electric Frontier Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Danielle Coffey, executive vice president for the News Media Alliance who supports the JCPA, said the language was removed because it didn’t necessarily have a place in a defense spending bill, reports CNN. It was not the only non-defense related language omitted from the final defense bill.
“At the end of the day, that determines our fate, even though there’s bipartisan support for this legislation,” Coffey said. “I don’t think anyone disagrees with the overall intention, which is to help newsrooms around the country.”
Insider Take
Meta’s stance is a familiar one. In addition to their showdown and brief pause on news on Facebook in Australia last year, Meta also stopped paying publishers for news in August as the company pivots toward the creator economy. They disagree that they should have to pay news outlets for the privilege of carrying news on Facebook, and they seem to have a lot of support from other heavy hitters to prevent that reality. The opposition, however, is also strong. Perhaps if the JCPA was a standalone bill there would be more of an opportunity to negotiate the language. There would also be more time to explore if there are more effective (and less controversial) ways to save local journalism in the U.S.
