Opponents See ‘Link Tax’ in Bill To Shore Up Online News Outlets

A bill that barely made it out of committee two months ago, one that looked to be on death’s door due to the shifting politics of Congress, appears to have been given a second life by being slipped into the must-pass defense authorization bill now before Congress. The measure could, if enacted, dramatically reshape the social media feeds of everyday Americans and the digital news business in general.Crafted by Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota, the measure, known as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, would force technology behemoths like Google and Facebook to begin paying regional news publishers for the right to search and index their content on the web. The bill’s detractors call it a “link tax.”The bill enjoys the support of most of America’s newspaper and digital-only news publishers, as well as local broadcasters and the media giants that own them such as the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.It was the Australian media mogul, in fact, who kicked off the campaign to punish Google for the demise of newspapers in 2009 when he alleged that the company is claiming the right to “take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production.”Opponents of the bill include an unlikely assortment of progressive and libertarian activists, center-right nonprofits, and conservative politicians. Senator Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, has threatened to filibuster the defense authorization act, which is required to continue funding the military next year, if the measure is not stripped from that bill.Conservatives oppose the measure on principle: The government, their argument goes, has no business forcing private companies to subsidize another industry. Progressives have opposed the measure because they believe it amounts to a handout to large corporations and private equity firms such as Alden Global Capital, which in recent years has bought enough newspaper companies to make itself the second-largest newspaper publisher in America.Senator Lee of Utah, who once called the measure “Obamacare for the press,” reiterated his opposition Tuesday, calling the maneuver a desperate ploy to get an unpopular measure passed during the lame duck session.“The JCPA does little to ‘preserve’ journalism and instead works to the benefit of large corporate news conglomerates,” Mr. Lee tweeted. “Don’t let desperate Democrats sneak the JCPA into the NDAA. It has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing conservative voices and independent journalism.”The technology companies targeted by the bill are incensed. A spokesman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, Andy Stone, said Monday that the platform will consider big changes if the bill is signed into law.“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” Mr Stone said.The threat is not an idle one. When Australia passed a similar law in early 2021, Facebook blocked both publishers and users from posting links to domestic and international news articles. The company reversed the decision several days later after global headlines about government agencies getting caught up in the ban and seeing their content disappear from the platform.Google has been mum on the bill currently before Congress, but has opposed similar measures as they have cropped up around the world. When the government of Spain passed a measure in 2014 requiring Google and other news aggregators to pay for the right to link to publishers there, Google shut down its Google News operation entirely. It only returned to the market in June of this year, after an eight-year hiatus.

Opponents See ‘Link Tax’ in Bill To Shore Up Online News Outlets

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