Revamped bill would give small news outlets more power in negotiating compensation from Google, Facebook

"Newly revamped federal legislation aimed at helping news publishers negotiate deals with tech giants would create a baseball-style arbitration process to settle disputes and wouldn’t apply to the biggest media companies, people familiar with the proposal said," Alexandra Bruell and Keach Hagey report for The Wall Street Journal. "The legislation amends an earlier proposal called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would allow publishers to band together to negotiate compensation from online platforms that use their content, including Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, without violating antitrust laws."

The tech giants have claimed increasingly large shares of news sites' digital advertising dollars as many news outlets' ad revenue has collapsed. "The new proposal includes language that would require the tech companies to negotiate with publishers," Bruell and Hagey report. "After 180 days, publishers could initiate 'final offer' arbitration—sometimes called 'baseball arbitration' because of its use in baseball negotiations—to come to a deal, according to the new proposal. In that process, the arbitrator chooses one side’s final offer."

Smaller news outlets have wondered if the proposal would leave a meaningful place for them at the table, and the process seems to be moving in their direction; the new version applies only to news organizations with fewer than 1,500 employees. "The staffing threshold applies to individual publications, even when they are owned by a larger parent company. Any broadcaster with a license under the Federal Communications Commission—which would include all local TV and radio stations—would also be eligible under the new proposal," Bruell and Hagey report. "The new draft also proposes a 10-year antitrust exemption for publishers, rather than the four-year exemption in the initial legislation."

Coincidentally, a new bill was introduced to Canada's legislature this week that aims to ensure fairness in digital advertising rates for digital news, especially rural news organizations. In Australia last month, independent news publishers staged a "news freeze" in an effort to get a bigger voice in such deals in that country, its Press Gazette reports.