A bill that might require Google and Facebook-owned Meta to pay publishers for the news presented on their platforms passed unchallenged by the state legislature, where legislative initiatives often fall by the wayside.
U.S. Assembly Bill 886 would require the tech giants to pay agreed-upon annual flat fees right into a fund for news organizations or to enter into mediation or arbitration and negotiate to pay media firms a share of their digital promoting revenue.
On Thursday, the bill survived the infamously deadly suspense hearing before the state Senate Budget Committee by a vote of 4 to 2, with Republican senators voting no.
Often, a lot of the bills included within the suspense file expire quietly.
Negotiations over AB 886, involving news publishers, tech industry representatives and lawmakers, proceed because the Aug. 31 deadline for lawmakers to pass the bill approaches, based on the office of Buffy Wicks, East Bay Assembly member and creator of the bill.
If passed, Governor Gavin Newsom would need to sign or veto the bill by September 30.
A spokesman for Newsom said this week that he would “evaluate this bill on its merits should it land on his desk.”
The bill, co-authored by Reps. Bill Essayli, a Republican from Riverside, and Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long Beach, was passed by the State Assembly in June 2023.
Many newspaper publishers and a few politicians blame Google and Meta for the hundreds of newspapers which have closed within the U.S. since 2005. As news and promoting moved online and the most important web platforms attracted huge audiences, publishers were essentially forced to permit their content on the platforms without receiving “little or no compensation” in return, Wicks said.
According to eMarketer, Google generates 28% of world digital promoting revenue, closely followed by Meta at 23%.
The California News Publishers Association – of which the news organization is a member – identified this week that a federal judge ruled last week that Google has an illegal monopoly on web search. News reporting accounts for 40 to 60 percent of Google's search results, said the group's lead attorney, Brittney Barsotti. The group blames Google and Meta's market dominance for the decline of stories media, the rise of misinformation and the “lack of credible and independent government oversight bodies in our state's communities.”
Meta said the overwhelming majority of Facebook users don’t visit the platform to devour news and political content, and that news on Facebook and Instagram “does not generate meaningful value for our users or our company.”
At a hearing within the California legislature in June, Jaffer Zaidi, Google's vp of world news partnerships, claimed that AB 886 was based on a “flawed premise” that web platforms use news for profit without compensation. Google Search sends “billions of visits” to the web sites of stories publishers of all sizes daily, providing them with “valuable free traffic,” Zaidi said.
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