Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine if you typed a search request into Google – say for information about the coronavirus or bushfires or the best phone to buy – and the results that came back to you included none from traditional media companies.
No news reports written by journalists, no independent reviews by technology reporters, no professional compilations of the latest on a crisis.
How useful would Google be to you then?
Or, if we think of the equally ubiquitous Facebook, how important would it be if you got content from friends, families and companies trying to sell you stuff, but nothing from journalism companies?
This is the question at the heart of the Australian government’s speeded up attempt, announced on Monday, to force the digital platforms that increasingly dominate news consumption into paying media companies for the content that turns up in our feeds and search results.
News media and the digital platforms are locked in symbiosis. They need each other. But which side needs the other more? Eight to 14% of Google searches yield news media stories in the results. On the other hand, news media need Google and Facebook to drive audiences to their sites.
It’s a game of chicken, and it’s playing out on the international stage.
On Monday the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, and communications minister, Paul Fletcher, announced the Australian attempt as the latest in a number of measures in the last few weeks to shore up news media – an essential industry.
At least 51 news media outlets and newsrooms have closed since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in Australia. Many are local newspapers that were already struggling. On the upside, the coronavirus disruption has given a welcome new focus and urgency to media policy. Fletcher, the recently installed new minister for communications, is clearly not one to waste a crisis.
The moves announced by the government on Monday follow similar, so far unsuccessful attempts to make Google and Facebook pay for news media content in Europe.
The first test came when Spain made it compulsory for digital platforms to pay news publishers for content. Google chose to simply pull the plug on Google News in that country – though not, notably, on news media results appearing in search.
More recently the European Union made the first few sentences and the headlines of news media content subject to copyright law. France was the first to reflect that in national law, and Google simply switched to showing headlines and links only, not text snippets – and refused to pay.
Earlier this month, France switched its approach to competition law. In a comparable move to that in Australia, its competition regulator ordered Google to negotiate with publishers in good faith. We await the results.
So what about Australia? Why should we succeed, in our tiny market, when others have so far failed?
A Google spokesperson did not respond on Monday to questions about whether Google would pull news content from its Australian searches if the law required the company to pay for using it, instead issuing its standard statement claiming that news sites benefited from Google search by gaining traffic.
In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday morning, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair, Rod Sims, said Monday’s announcement had not been done in coordination with his counterparts in France.
He talks to them regularly, but their most recent conversations did not include planned action in Australia. That’s how fast things have moved over the last week.
The push for speed came from the politicians, not the ACCC. The politicians, in turn, are responding to a strong campaign by the media, News Corp in particular, for action against Google and Facebook.
The ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry, which reported in 2019, recommended an enforceable code for Google and Facebook, to be composed by the Australian Communications and Media Association. It also recommended a range of other measures to protect and bolster public interest journalism.
The government gave a generally flat bat response. For example, it rejected proposals to amend the tax act to make philanthropic donations to journalism tax deductible and was non-specific about how it would “enhance” its existing grant program for regional media.
But the last few weeks have changed that, with action to bring forward funding for journalism, including public interest news gathering, an issues paper about making streaming services contribute to Australian content, and now this latest announcement.
Sims said he had been asked by the government about a week ago to report on progress in getting a voluntary code under which news media would be paid for content used by Google and Facebook.
He responded that there had been some progress on transparency of algorithms – the mechanisms by which the digital platforms determine who gets which content – and data sharing, but no progress on the crucial issue of sharing the revenue generated by using news media content.
In response to the government imperative to come up with a mandatory code by the end of July, Sims says: “We will obviously be talking to our international colleagues … we’ll work our way through it as best we can.”
It’s complicated. The ACCC has to think through how a code might apply to different media outlets – News Corp, Nine and Seven and smaller outlets such as the Guardian. There is also the question of how to deal with the content generated by the public broadcasters, ABC and SBS.
Part of Sims’ cautious optimism rests on the fact that Australia is starting with competition law, rather than the murky and malleable world of copyright, which was the starting place in Europe.
There, the moves gave rise to fears that all kinds of content might disappear from the internet – including, for example, gifs. Sims says copyright is “tricky” for news content.
“I don’t think copyright is the right place to start,” he said. Competition law is more fit for purpose because “you have very unequal bargaining power that could represent an important market failure”.
But the compulsory code won’t fix all ills. Sims acknowledges that it will largely benefit large and nationally focused media outlets, rather than suburban and regional outlets.
“A search will show up articles from News Corporation and Nine and the Guardian, but you won’t get taken to the Cairns Posts or whatever,” he said.
That matters, because while all media companies are under strain from the collapse of the advertising-driven business model, it is at the local level that news deserts have already emerged in Australia. All of the closures in the last few weeks have been of local outlets and newsrooms.
More policy moves might be needed if local media is to survive.
Google has claimed that it sells advertising, not search. That is true, but also disingenuous. Google’s appeal to the market – the reason people log on and see the ads – is that you can find out anything you need to know from using its search engine.
Without news media, that promise is compromised. Said Sims: “I think there’s no doubt there’s a value going both ways.”
The sudden push by the Australian government is undoubtedly spurred by the coronavirus crisis, but reining in the digital behemoths will in the long term have to be an international effort – equivalent in scale, though moving much faster, than the historical legal battles over antitrust law and copyright law in the 19th century.
If governments act in concord, it is hard to see how Google in particular can continue to deliver on its promise to the market without coming to a deal regarding professional news content.
The alternative, of course, would be to fully enter the news business – building its own newsrooms and competing with big media head to head. No sign of that yet, but this will be a long battle.
