Facebook Fight By Media Media Payments focuses on Europe

Australia on Thursday passed a law addressing many of the same issues, the terms of which recently forced Facebook to remove news from its platform in the country for five days before reversing course after winning some government changes.

Both laws come from the same debate: what, in any case, publishers should pay when their news is available through technology platforms.

Publishers argue that news is a major attraction for services like Google and that they should receive a share of corporate revenue. Technology companies and technology advocates respond that they are already increasing the revenue of media companies by sending them tens of billions of visits to the website monthly, and that the free link is the lifeblood of Internet.

Senior EU officials have said the Facebook movement in Australia shows that technology platforms exert too much power against the press and other media. The episode shows that “we just can’t leave decisions that have a big impact on our democracies in computer programs without any human supervision or in Silicon Valley boardrooms,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, at the Munich Security Conference. last week.

EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton on Monday urged member countries to swiftly pass national versions of copyright law to strengthen the right of their news publishers to compensate for technology platforms.

“Google and Facebook are great for splitting publishers and playing against them,” said Axel Voss, a German center-right member of the European Parliament who oversaw the adoption of the copyright law. Voss said the new European law allows news content producers to join in the negotiation of revenue to obtain licenses for its content, and could even do so across EU borders.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, said in a blog post on Wednesday that Australian law stems from a misunderstanding of his relationship with media companies, who choose to post their content on social media. . Clegg acknowledged that the Internet has disrupted the news business and said the company plans to spend $ 1 billion over the next three years to support it.

“But a new agreement should be based on the facts of how the value of online news is derived, not on an upside-down portrait of how news and information flow on the Internet,” he wrote.

News Corp.,

the mother of The Wall Street Journal, has a business deal to provide news via Facebook.

“We’ve funded journalism for many years,” Google said Monday on its European Twitter account. The company has said it provides 24 billion visits to publisher sites worldwide each month and also has hundreds of partnerships with news publishers. Google has signed paid license agreements with more than 500 publishers in more than a dozen countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia, for a product called News Showcase.

The battle in Australia for media payments is the latest example of an issue that has emerged globally for more than a decade.

In France, the only country to implement the new EU law, Google signed licensing agreements for News Showcase in November with several publications, including Le Monde. The deals came after a French court reaffirmed an order from the country’s antitrust regulator that Google had to negotiate.

French publications had complained to the regulator after Google said it would only show headlines in news search results in France, as permitted by the new copyright law, unless a publication grants rights to display snippets longer for free.

In a way, Australian law goes further than in Europe, forcing technology companies and news publishers to submit to mandatory arbitration if they cannot agree on payment terms.

Google also initially opposed the legislation, at a time threatening to shut down its search engine in Australia. Recently, however, he chose to sign content agreements with several publishers, including News Corp., which also owns newspapers in Australia.

News Corp has supported Australian and EU law.

Some European officials expressed solidarity with Australia.

“I really find it very detrimental for a platform to behave in this way to protest against a country’s law. We have to support Australia in this fight,” Mr Breton, who is French, said on Monday. “The European solution is the Copyright Directive, which provides the press with a new right to a fairer and more equitable share of the benefit,” he said.

Some politicians and analysts say Facebook’s tough ball tactics could show that Europe needs to be even tougher.

“We need to expand the rules that protect national publishers [because] the economic sustainability of numerous companies, thousands of jobs and national and European digital sovereignty are at stake, ”said Federico Mollicone, a member of the Italian parliament of Brothers of Italy, one of the main opposition parties.

Some legal analysts claim that Australia’s new legislation, based on competition law, has sharper teeth than European copyright law. Martin Kretschmer, a professor of intellectual property law at the University of Glasgow, said copyright law is the wrong tool to protect publishers because it should not prevent news content from being linked. a quote.

“To address this problem, you need to change the power of the market. Stronger interventions, such as competition law, may be needed, “Kretschmer said.” The Copyright Directive is already yesterday’s law. “

Mr Voss said the law has not yet been tested because only France has used it.

“We thought that would be enough” to protect publishers, Voss said, but if that’s not enough, “maybe we’ll have to fine-tune this instrument.”

—Eric Sylvers from Milan contributed to this article.

Write to Daniel Michaels to [email protected] and Sam Schechner to [email protected]