Will Google Stop Stealing Content From the Media?

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Years from now, if newspapers and magazines manage to survive, historians will wonder how Google and Facebook got away for so long with stealing their content.

Basically, the business model of the platform giants is to use their search engines to deliver someone else’s copyrighted content for free to end users, and compensate the content originators with a puny share of the ad revenues, most of which is kept by the platform company.

Now, Australia has threatened this model, with legislation that has compelled Google to share more equitably with news media. The first mover to take advantage of the greater bargaining parity is none other than Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp stands to gain tens of millions of dollars from a deal struck with Google in the new Aussie regulatory environment.

This builds on a similar deal made in France last month, where French publishers used the leverage of a new EU copyright law to extract fairer revenue sharing from Google. These are welcome developments.

But where is the U.S. with similar reforms? Basically, nowhere. In the U.S., there is more indignation about privacy violations.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has sponsored legislation similar to Australia’s that would give media companies more clout to bargain with the platform giants.

That’s a start, but this is not a great model, because it leaves the bargaining to large media companies. Outfits like The American Prospect don’t exactly have a lot of leverage. If we deny our content to Google searches, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Far better would be a law requiring platforms to deliver all ad revenue to media companies in proportion to search results, and then compensate by charging for searches—in the same way that media consumers now are in the habit of paying for movies and music. Searches of expensive-to-produce content are “free” to the user only to the extent that they exploit the content originator.

When will something like this happen? Maybe right after we enact single-payer health insurance.

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