Social media should pay the Press for content. Europe shows how it can be done

Digital copyright law is intended to help writers, newspapers, video producers by ensuring they get fairly compensated for their work.

By Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli (Euroscope)

Published: Sun 31 Mar 2019, 9:19 PM

Last updated: Sun 31 Mar 2019, 11:20 PM

It might be fraught with problems, but a new law approved by the European Parliament last week could be the first effort with real power to rein in some of negative impacts of the Internet, itself a phenomenon so powerful it has fundamentally altered the social landscape of the world we live in.
The legislature has approved sweeping changes to the EU's digital copyright law in a move intended to help writers, newspapers, book publishers, video producers and record labels stand up to Silicon Valley tech giants by ensuring they get fairly compensated for their work.
In a 348-274 vote, the majority dismissed widespread concerns that the new law scheduled to take effect in 2021 would stifle free speech and innovation. Opponents of the measure say it could actually damage local newspapers and other sites it intends to protect by limiting web traffic directed to them.
The law would have to be adopted and enforced by individual EU member nations for it to have any real teeth. Like many complex issues addressed by the EU, the legislation has enforcement problems and possible unintended results, but it does show the parliament is trying to embrace a higher set of values than other digital powerhouse regions. Of the three great centers of Internet power - the other two are the US and China - only Europe is trying to place fairness first. In the hard-knock world of the Internet, the other two seem to have dismissed the ideal as either untenable or undesirable.
The first and biggest centre of power, Silicon Valley, is no longer the Wild West of the Internet, but in the single-minded bid for growth at any cost, the nerds of Silicon Valley have cut a wide swath across today's world. In the process they laid waste to many traditional businesses including newspapers.
Google and Facebook claim they are tech companies, not media companies, but they are the two biggest recipients of advertising dollars worldwide today.
The difference in definition is huge: As media companies they might have to pay professionals who create content and be subject to existing laws that punish the carriers of false information or those who benefit from the creative work of others without authorisation. As tech companies they can claim they only facilitate the exchange of ideas.
Yet Google took in almost $42 billion in ad revenues last year followed by Facebook at $23 billion. Together they had 58 per cent of the all the digital advertising purchased across the entire world. And as tech giants continued pumping the advertising well dry, newspapers have withered and died.
Some observers think perplexing political developments in the West in recent times can be traced to the decline of traditional newspapers whose professionals fact-checked and verified the news. But many of those once-great pillars of communities are now gone or a shadow of their former selves. The so-called business model now available dooms them to failure.
With ad revenues paid on a per-click basis, sites must attract enormous traffic to generate even modest income, and that is often short of costs. Writers, editors and video professionals rightly want the pay their talent deserves.
But in the shouting match that has become the Internet, sites that offer "click-bait" sensationalised or even untrue stories are less costly to create and maintain, and can generate big traffic through outrageous claims. The current system offers real rewards for those who trade in false information - what is known today as Fake News.
In the topsy-turvy digital world, purveyors of false information are more easily rewarded than those who tell the truth. And on top of that, recent estimates say up to 50 per cent of all Internet traffic is itself fake, the result of click farms and bots.
Clearly it is not a recipe for reason and reality. The plan by the EU tries to bring some sense to the situation by requiring news aggregators such as Google to pay a small sum to news sites for each snippet of news it carries. The law would also require sites to monitor what is shared by users to ensure the actual copyright holders are credited or compensated.
Opponents of the new EU law include some of the biggest names and companies in the Internet world. Some are flying the flag of free speech, while others say it would be almost impossible to implement due to the vastness of Internet traffic and technical requirements. Google could scrap its news aggregator altogether. Others contend that instead of encouraging the spread of professional news it would create barriers so high that only existing tech giants could afford to comply, preempting the next generation of innovators.
But the loss of the professional news industry goes far beyond nostalgia and the yearning for another era when father read the news over a morning cup of coffee. The loss has been profoundly damaging to responsible public discourse. Even if flawed, the effort by the EU can be seen as a first step in a long and long-overdue journey back to reality.
Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli are editors at www.luminosityitalia.com