COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 26/05/2020
Mathew Ingram
In a recent column for the New York Times, media writer Ben Smith wrote about how regulators in Australia and France are moving to force digital platforms like Google and Facebook to pay media companies directly for the content they carry from publishers, in the wake of new copyright rules set by the European Union last year. A number of other countries have also tried to do this, with varying degrees of success—Germany passed a copyright law in 2013, but has had difficulty enforcing it, while Spain passed a similar law in 2014, at which point Google responded by shutting down its Google News service completely in that country. The rationale for these kinds of moves against the digital platforms, as Smith laid out in his column, is relatively simple: Google and Facebook took control of the advertising industry, thereby destroying the media’s ability to earn a living, which in turn has led to a decline in journalism.