Big Tech damaging journalism

Treasury is contemplating the Morrison government’s response to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s landmark digital platforms inquiry. In July, the ACCC set out 23 recommendations to address the imbalance between traditional media — such as News Corp Australia, publisher of this newspaper — and technology behemoths Facebook and Google. The last thing the tech giants want is regulation of an industry they have dominated while perfecting a risk-free business model. Get others to employ people, invest in systems and produce stories, then bolt on your proprietary platforms and harvest the data and content via algorithms for vast profits. Is it fair? No. Is this legal? Yes. Is it moral? It is indefensible.

In a submission to Treasury, our parent backed a recommendation for the ACCC to set up a digital branch to monitor potentially unfair and anti-competitive practices and to enforce competition and consumer issues. As the ACCC report documents, Google and Facebook have sucked dry the advertising revenue on which media companies rely to fund journalism. We support a new code of conduct — backed by legislation and enforced by the ACCC, not the Australian Communications and Media Authority as proposed — to govern relations between the news media and the digital platforms. The way we see it, platforms would be banned from using any publisher’s content and from collecting any data generated from it unless all publishers had negotiated agreements. We also want a fresh inquiry into the supply of ad tech services, a market that is “opaque by design” and dominated by Google and Facebook.

Given their supernormal profits depend on the unconscionable status quo, the tech titans are lobbying their hearts out. Trust us, we are friends of journalism, they claim. But when it comes to its market power being subject to ACCC oversight or compensating content creators fairly, Google for one says take a jump. Like it or not, the tech giants are “unavoidable business partners” whose algorithms rank and distribute news content and ads to consumers. Governments can no longer ignore the harm being done to traditional media businesses, which are trying to build subscription services. In Australia, Britain, the US and the EU, authorities are waking up to the social and economic damage the tech giants have inflicted. Writing on Monday, News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller argued how the Morrison government responded would have a “profound effect on our media”. We must get the balance right. Without swift reforms, more media jobs will disappear, small publishers will fail, and communities will lose vital sources of local news and information.