Hold tech titans accountable

The first wave of submissions to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s review of the market power of technology giants Google and Facebook has underlined the need for effective regulation of digital platforms. The two tech titans, which are the largest media companies in the world by far, produce no content themselves. They undermine media and entertainment companies’ businesses, and their ability to employ professional journalists and other staff, by widely distributing those companies’ content, using it to snare the lion’s share of digital advertising around the world. In Australia, 19 million people use Google every month, 17 million use Facebook and YouTube (owned by Google), and 11 million use Instagram (owned by Facebook). Google has a 96 per cent share of online search advertising, and Facebook and Instagram snare 46 per cent of display advertising while no other site has more than 5 per cent.

In December, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said the strong market positions of Google and Facebook warranted greater oversight. Such platforms, he said, were “more than mere distributors or pure intermediaries in the supply of news in Australia; they increasingly perform similar functions as media businesses, like selecting, curating and ranking content’’. Yet they were less regulated than other media. For the sake of democracy and the scrutiny of government and other institutions provided by quality journalism, current imbalances in the system need to be redressed. As Nine Entertainment, which owns The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, argued, intervention in digital media must ensure publications and their journalists are paid adequately for content.

Village Roadshow CEO Graham Burke, in his submission, hit the nail on the head. The lack of protection of original content on Google and Facebook was effectively enabling “piracy” and “copyright theft’’, he said. Mr Burke, whose businesses oversee film and television production, said digital platforms have been practically exempt from meaningful regulation worldwide for 20 years. Regulators now need to catch up with technology.

Google, predictably, rejected the prospect of additional oversight. It rebuffed scrutiny of the complex, opaque algorithms it uses to rank stories online. These, it said, were “some of our most sensitive business secrets … central to our competitive success’’. In a preliminary report in December, the ACCC proposed a regulator that would force Google and Facebook to lift the lid on the algorithms, which leave technology to decide what internet users read and watch. That has provoked concerns the algorithms have allowed fake news to flourish, encouraging special-interest groups to huddle in information bubbles where their views are not challenged by competing arguments.

Privacy is also a key issue. Few Australians realise how much information social media giants have about them. When a reporter from The Australian downloaded a copy of his ­entire Facebook history last year, it included every phone contact, email address, past relationship and photo documented in eight years using the ­website. The ACCC ’s moves to regulate the tech titans will be watched keenly in overseas jurisdictions facing similar challenges. Explaining the need for such regulation to unsuspecting internet users will be vital.