Bipartisan bill takes on Big Tech - Google and Facebook

There’s nothing wrong with a little competition. We all enjoy seeing two teams, evenly matched, duke it out on the playing field. We know that competition between two businesses create better outcomes for the consumer.

But no one likes to see a game when one competitor uses unfair tactics to totally destroy his or her challenger. That is what is happening in the news industry today.

Today, many local newspapers are under incredible financial pressure, in part because the control of access to trustworthy news on-line has become concentrated between two Big Tech companies: Facebook and Google. They set the rules for how, where and when we see journalistic content on-line and how much revenue is made – and by whom – from the hard work of journalists across the nation and around the world.

Big Tech’s dominance over news distribution and the ad sales it drives threatens quality journalism, and the cost of inaction is too great to continue to ignore. In recent years, we have all seen how critical the free press is to a functioning democracy as the spread of dangerous misinformation on-line has permeated our culture.

Big Tech platforms are built to favor content that drive clicks which, in turn, favors extreme and outrageous misinformation. Social media has filled its content with untrustworthy sources, becoming America’s de facto local news source and their revenue models are structurally built around distributing content that divides us.

The government cannot regulate news under the First Amendment, leaving the Facebook and Google free to handle it as they see fit.

Ironically, U.S. antitrust laws prevent small and local papers from coming together to negotiate fair compensation from the tech giants for the news content they pay to produce.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is a bipartisan bill that is specifically focused on addressing Google and Facebook’s threat to the free press. The JCPA would provide a temporary, limited antitrust safe harbor for news publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for fair compensation for the use of their content. It’s narrowly tailored to ensure that coordination by news publishers is only in the interest of protecting trustworthy, quality journalism.

Our Founders understood that quality journalism is key to sustaining civic society. This is why a free press is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it’s why we must ensure that the people who create journalistic content are compensated for their work. With the passage of the JCPA, all news publishers, especially small and local newspapers, would finally be able to ask the tech platforms for the compensation they need and deserve.

Many members of Congress across the country and on both sides of the aisle have already shown their commitment to local journalism by co-sponsoring the JCPA. We need support from every member of Congress. We are asking our members of Congress, to support the JCPA, which would give news publishers the ability to seek fair compensation for use of their content.

We hope the Nebraska congressional delegation will agree that the honest, quality reporting we provide for our community – and the future of all local journalism – is worth fighting for. We urge them to join their colleagues in co-sponsoring the JCPA today.