NBA writes to Google urging revenue sharing by intermediary tech platforms

Now, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has written to Google urging it to compensate and pay publishers. In a letter dated 9.3.2021 addressed to Sanjay Gupta, Country Manager, Google India, Rajat Sharma, President, NBA, wrote, “News organisations make heavy investments in employing anchors, journalists and reporters to gather, verify and deliver credible information, but are inadequately compensated – the largest share of advertising revenue flows disproportionately to Intermediary Technology Platforms such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc.”

Highlighting how digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way media content is produced, distributed and consumed, the NBA letter stated that a changing media landscape, with the majority of the public using digital platforms to obtain their news, has resulted in a power imbalance between traditional media/ news organizations and big-tech/digital technology platforms.

“Google plays a key role in this value chain as an intermediary and plays a part in delivering this news content to its audiences albeit without sufficiently compensating the content owners,” the letter further stated, adding that the current situation reflects the unfair distribution of advertising revenues and opaqueness of the advertising system, which is causing the digital news businesses to come under tremendous pressure/ stress. “Advertising revenues form the backbone of the news broadcasters. However, they are seeing their share of the advertising pie shrinking in the digital space since technology giants are taking away the major chunk, leaving news broadcasters with a nominal share,” the letter stressed.

Sharma also referred to countries like Australia, France and other European countries that have taken the lead in addressing/ rectifying this power imbalance through legislative enactments, which ensure that Google, Facebook and other internet tech giants adequately pay news publishers for their highest quality news content. It may be recalled that Google has recently agreed to compensate and pay publishers in France, Australia and the European Union.

The letter goes on to point out that an independent and robust media landscape is vital for a well-functioning democracy and to sustain/ safeguard public interest in journalism. This requires the ecosystem to be made transparent and sustainable by evening out the bargaining power between news publishers/ broadcasters and digital platforms/ intermediaries.

“Evidently, there is an urgent need to create an equitable relationship and level the playing field between global tech monopolies and traditional media/ news organisations,” Sharma urged in his letter, adding that being a multinational organisation following global best practices in all the countries it operates, Google is expected to employ principles of universal parity in dealing with News Content owners and employ similar norms in India.

The letter urged the Google India Head to urgently look into the matter and examine the issues at play to ensure the ecosystem remains sustainable, and added that NBA was ready to meet Google through VC in this regard.

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INS demands that Google compensate publishers for news content

It may be noted here that last month, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) had also written to Google, urging the global Internet giant to compensate the Indian newspapers comprehensively for the use of content published by the newspapers and share its advertising revenues properly.