A California bill that aims to ease newspapers’ internet-age woes by making Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook pay for the online articles their users access through their platforms advanced out of its first committee hearing Tuesday night, but not without lots of questions from lawmakers.
“A free and diverse press is the backbone of a healthy and vibrant democracy,” Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, told the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, which passed her bill on a 9-0 vote with two members abstaining. “These dominant companies are padding their profit margins with locally produced news without adequately compensating the originators of that content.”
But while her colleagues on the committee supported the idea, they said it’s going to need some work.
“I appreciate that a problem-solver legislator has agreed to tackle this,” said Assemblyman Steve Bennett, a Democrat representing Oxnard. “The marketplace is a very hard place to try to regulate for an outcome. It’s hard to do this, but it’s important to try to do this… I’ll support this, but at the same time, I have my eyes open about the ability to get to the goal.”
Wicks’ bill, AB 886, the California Journalism Preservation Act, comes after the December collapse in Congress of a similar federal bill, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, carried by U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.
Sponsored by the California News Publishers Association, to which this news organization belongs, Wicks’ bill would work differently by requiring internet platforms to use binding arbitration to determine the percentage of advertising revenue to compensate news organizations. Australia and Canada have passed similar laws.
While the bill is backed by a number of print and broadcast news organizations, it is opposed by the ACLU of California, the California Chamber of Commerce, California…
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