When it comes to an effort to have big technology companies pay news organizations for their content, the legislature is pushing its deadline.
Legislators last week said this isn’t the year for the bipartisan California Journalism Preservation Act, instead punting it to 2024. The idea, said Sen. Tom Umberg, is to give stakeholders more time to hash out some of the more complicated details in the interim.
“I’m supportive of credible media being made available to the public,” said Umberg, D-Santa Ana. “The bill is fairly complicated in how you’re going to enforce it and who it benefits. We want to structure it in the interim and come back to work on it next year.”
The bill, from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, is meant to help news organizations that have struggled financially in the age of social media, where content helps bring in ad revenue for those platforms.
The bill would require large online platforms, like Google and Meta, that host news content from certain publishers to negotiate with them for a share of the advertising revenue. The bill is opposed by major tech firms.
Bill stalls to make Big Tech pay California publishers for news
“Wicks and I and our staff spent considerable amounts of time talking about it and came to the conclusion that more work needed to be done before it passed out of the final policy committee,” said Umberg.
So what does it mean for the legislation now that it’s been marked as what’s called a two-year bill, otherwise called a “carryover bill?”
Like the federal government, the California Legislature works on two-year calendars. As the legislature is now in its first year, bills can be put on pause for this year and brought back up the next.
This bill, AB 886, has already passed out of its house of origin (the Assembly) which gives legislators a few extra months in 2024 before they must act on it, according to Chris Micheli, a veteran lobbyist in Sacramento.
The idea is to work on…
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