The future of the free press is in the hands of EU lawmakers

On September 12th, in Strasbourg, MEPs will vote on a draft law that is of paramount importance for maintaining the free press.

The bill will correct the grotesque disparity between internet giants on the one hand and publishers and news agencies on the other. In the current situation, internet giants are looting the content of publishers and news agencies to generate advertising revenue.

The reform was fiercely opposed by Facebook and Google based on an outright invention: an alleged threat to people’s free access to the Internet. In fact, there has never been any doubt about it.

What the EU proposal on copyright reform wants to change is actually quite simple. Without paying for it, internet giants like Google and Facebook use enormous amounts of news that press publishers and news agencies produce at high costs.

They use this news to attract more and more advertising money, thus sucking the income from press publishers.

In addition, with their huge audience, they are attracting a growing number of content-related advertisements, so that Facebook and Google have already become a duopoly, which in 2017 shared eighty percent of global internet advertising revenue – with the exception of China.

As part of the reform, they would have to share a small part of their sales proceeds with the creators of this content. It’s about adapting copyright law to reality, not more. The last European directive on this comes from a time when Google, Facebook, YouTube and smartphones had not yet seen the light of day.

The basic question is: why should the internet giants get almost all of the advertising revenue they have around news that they didn’t pay to produce?

Press publishers and news agencies find themselves in a grotesque situation: They invest large sums in the production of the news and it is their journalists who – sometimes at great personal risk – endeavor to provide accurate, diverse and comprehensive reporting. You need to fund the large investments that are needed in online news.

As newspaper sales plummet, their only hope lies in increasing Internet sales. But they have to realize that the big Internet players get hold of the fruits of their labor for free and rob them of the opportunity to monetize their content and siphon off potential advertising revenue.

The result is the impoverishment of an entire industry. Over the past 20 years, the major Internet players have undermined the strength of traditional media, despite the media’s usually successful efforts to expand online user groups. Since 2000, advertising revenues from newspaper publishers have plummeted across Europe, in France, for example, by 70 percent.

Thousands of journalists have been laid off in a series of layoffs. In the past decade, in the US, home to the dominant Internet players, the print media has lost more than half of its advertising revenue and editorial offices lost 45 percent of their staff – they are now only about 39,000 journalists.

The looting of news media content and advertising revenue by internet giants is a threat to both consumers and democracy as it depopulates newsrooms and undermines any means of funding high quality local journalism. It is this imbalance that the proposed European directive aims to correct by providing authors with adequate remuneration for their work.

Can the titans of the internet compensate the media without making people pay to access the internet? The answer is clearly “yes”. Facebook reported $ 40 billion in sales and $ 16 billion in profits in 2017. Google had sales of $ 110 billion in the same year, making a profit of $ 12.7 billion. Who could reasonably argue that they would not be able to make fair payments for the content they used?

Given that these companies are already avoiding taxes in Europe, is it acceptable for them not to pay their content suppliers, but for them to pay taxes and cover the costs of reporting?

Can MEPs accept that national and European media content is simply skimmed off by the internet giants? Do they see the risk that the only survivors in the news industry will be increasingly dependent on taxpayers’ money – and on the governments that our agencies are supposed to hold accountable?

What we are really talking about is introducing a fair cash benefit from those who exploited the news. In the interests of the free press and the democratic values ​​of Europe, EU lawmakers should push ahead with copyright reform.

AFP