The passage of legislation that would allow news outlets to collectively bargain for advertising revenue with Google and Facebook is necessary to ensure the US keeps up with the rest of the world, Senator Amy Klobuchar has said.
During a hearing on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-to-seven to advance the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to the full Senate with support from both parties, but several Democrats raised concerns that not enough of the money would be directed towards journalists.
Klobuchar said Congress needs to address the “existential crisis” facing newsrooms and take meaningful steps to regulate major technology platforms.
“The world’s moving without us,” Klobuchar said. “I would think given that we are the country where these companies have developed and innovation has occurred, that we’d want to have some say in saving some of our own democracy, saving our own journalism.”
The Democrat from Minnesota has championed the JCPA as a lifeline for disappearing local newsrooms.
Reintroduced in April, the JCPA would allow media outlets with less than 1,500 employees to jointly negotiate advertising rates with certain technology platforms without fear of running afoul of the Sherman Act for six years. The legislation would mandate the use of binding arbitration should the publishers and platforms fail to reach an agreement.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a nearly-identical version of the JCPA last year following a 15-to-seven vote, but the bill never came to the floor for a vote by the full chamber.
The bill was reportedly being considered as an amendment to the omnibus spending bill, like the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act and State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, but did not appear in the final version.
Klobuchar highlighted Australia’s success in protecting local news outlets with a similar bill. Since its statute was enacted in 2021, local news outlets in the country received about 140 million AUD from tech platforms’ advertising payouts each year, Klobuchar said.
“Despite all the fearmongering from tech lobbyists, the Internet did not break in Australia when this happened,” Klobuchar said. “News outlets are getting compensated and hiring more journalists, and Google and Facebook did not go under in the ‘land down under.’”
According to the advocacy group Public Knowledge, the money from Google and Facebook did not come from joint negotiations with the Australian news publishers, but rather an upfront payment.
Australian lawmakers passed amendments that allowed digital platforms to avoid being covered by the joint bargaining portion of the law if they made “a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses”.
Canada is currently considering its version of collective bargaining for news outlets and Facebook has experimented with pulling news links.
On Thursday, Democratic Senator Alex Padilla said that the JCPA should be redirected back to helping media industry employees. While he fully agrees with the JCPA’s goals, Padilla said he could not support advancing the proposed statute as written.
“Let’s actually make it about journalists,” Padilla said.
He highlighted that California’s version of the law includes a provision that requires 70% of the news outlets’ revenue from the bill to go directly to newsroom workers. Ignoring these employees while “claiming to be fighting for them is absurd”, Padilla said.
Senators John Ossof, Peter Welch, Cory Booker, Chris Coons and Mazie Hirono shared Padilla’s concerns but still voted in favour of the JCPA. Padilla was the sole Democrat to vote against it.
Republican Senators John Kennedy, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz voted alongside most Democrats in voting to advance the bill.
Several Republican lawmakers also claimed the bill could lead to censorship concerns in its current form – echoing arguments raised by Senator Ted Cruz during the amendment process last year.
During Thursday’s hearing, Senator Tom Cotton said he is also offering amendments that would ensure news media and Big Tech cannot “collude” to censor conservative views under the guise of misinformation.
Senator Mike Lee said it is “not hard to see why” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared that the JCPA is “dead in the House”.
He slammed the bill for making no sense and failing to address the root cause of the problem: technology companies’ ability to earn “monopoly rents” from digital advertising. Lee has proposed a bill that would potentially require Google and other platforms to break up their ad businesses.
Klobuchar said she is committed to addressing her colleagues’ concerns about adequately protecting journalists but wants to ensure the JCPA does not fall into the “my way or the highway” trap in terms of amendments.
She claimed it happens all too often, as evidenced by Congress’ other failed efforts to rein in technology companies.
“It helps the platforms every single time,” she said.
The hearing concluded yesterday.
