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In this episode we are featuring coverage by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the two main pieces of legislation aimed at regulating US big tech and its relationship with news publishing outlets.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was introduced in 2021, in order to “provide a temporary safe harbor for publishers of online content to collectively negotiate with dominant online platforms regarding the terms on which content may be distributed.”
In May, four US senators introduced the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act or “DAA” for short, an attempt to regulate, and even break up, the biggest online advertising companies in the world.
Here are the main takeaways:
- Proposed changes to the JCPA will limit the organizations that could get compensation to publications with 1,500 employees or fewer. But that won’t preserve competition, because many smaller publications are now owned or backed by large corporations and venture capital funds.
- News aggregators and search engines will simply refuse to link to news outlets that demand payment, meaning that some of the most reliable sources of news and information will become far less accessible to the public.
- Big tech’s control of digital advertising markets and the vast majority of data in those markets means they can squeeze publications and advertisers by extracting higher shares of advertising revenue.
- The DAA, targets the problem at its source. It breaks up the ad market into four components—publishing, ad exchanges, sell-side, and buy-side brokerages, and prevents companies making more than $20 billion a year in advertising revenue from owning more than one of those components at a time.
At Our-Hometown we support an online strategy through our Digital Initiative, for news publishers to utilize these tech platforms to extend the reach of content, but with the goal of driving readers back to their own site, where publishers can choose monetization strategies based upon their specific needs.
Thanks for watching Today in News Tech, the vodcast where we discuss innovations happening in digital journalism. Remember to like and subscribe to keep up with everything happening in online media.
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