The Government will follow Australia and Canada in proposing a law that will require internet giants Google and Meta to pay for the local news they use.
The intervention is designed to throw a lifeline to media organisations that have seen their advertising revenues eroded as their audiences have moved online and been captured instead by internet search and social media companies.
Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson confirmed on Sunday that the Government will introduce legislation to act as a “backstop” when big internet platforms did not voluntarily strike deals with media outlets.
He said it was likely they would be given three to six months before the mandatory mediation process began.
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“We’ve probably lost 50% of journalists in the last 10 years. We’ve got to give hope to the small players out there. I’m proud to bring forward this legislation to support them,” he told media.
He said it was likely the big players would want to do a deal to avoid the mandated process. “In Canada, deals are being done everywhere. They’ve just done 150 deals because they don’t want to go legislation.”
Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher said she was pleased the Government had recognised the “significant power imbalance” between publishers and the platforms.
She said it was a strong move to support the local media industry.
“For too long the platforms have been able to use journalism made and paid for by publishers to help build businesses of near unimaginable scale and power. Off the back of content invested in and created by others, they have been able to capture the vast majority of the digital advertising market, undermining the sustainability of local publishers and local journalism,” she said.
“Globally, we’ve seen that without legislation the platforms are extremely reticent to make any kind of meaningful offer. That has certainly been the experience here in Aotearoa, despite the Commerce Commission granting permission for the news publishing industry to negotiate as a collective to help address the power imbalance.
“To date, offers put forward have been insignificant compared to the deals secured by Australian and Canadian publishers who have world-leading legislation in their camp.
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Canadian MP Peter Julian quizzes Google Canada’s Colin McKay during a hearing on Canada’s media-funding bill.
“We want a deal for the whole industry – publishers large and small – that represents a fair exchange for the value the platforms get out of using our content to allow us to keep investing and developing high quality New Zealand journalism.We look forward to seeing the shape of the legislation when it is introduced [in the New Year],” she said.
The legislation would be based on that used in Canada.
Canada’s Online News Act, which is currently in front of the Canadian equivalent of a select committee, would require “digital news intermediaries”, intended to include Google and Meta, strike funding deals with news organisations if they facilitate access to their content in any way.
Google’s head of public policy in Canada, Colin McKay, told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in October that the Australian regime, which Google had initially opposed, was “a workable solution”.
But he said it had serious concerns with the Canadian approach.
That was in part because it defined news businesses that would be eligible for the support extremely broadly and did not require they adhere to “basic journalistic standards”, he said.
That could mean Canada’s media funding law led to the proliferation of misinformation and clickbait and that Canadians could “be served foreign propaganda outlets alongside reporting from Le Devoir or The Globe and Mail,” he said.
Meta’s global policy director Kevin Chan objected to such laws more generally, saying the presumption that Meta unfairly benefited from its relationship with publishers was untrue and that it was instead providing them with “free marketing”.
“A policy that unfairly subsidises legacy media companies now struggling to adapt to the online environment is an approach that will harm competition, reduce trust in media and make the transition to digital models even more difficult,” Chan said.
He went on to say that Facebook could be “forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada”.
Google and Facebook-owner Meta fought a rear-guard battle against a similar law change in Australia before a compromise was struck, and both have voiced concerns about a proposed media funding bill in Canada.
The Australian government lit the path for regulatory intervention last year when it passed its News Media Bargaining Code.
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Emergency services and health Facebook pages have been caught up in the tech company’s decision to block Australian news content.
That effectively forced Google and Meta to negotiate deals with the media under threat of having them imposed by an arbitrator appointed by the Australian Media Communications Authority.
Rod Sims, a former chairperson of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, has said that law resulted in Google and Meta agreeing payments worth more than A$200m (NZ$212m) a year to the media there, though neither company has confirmed that figure.
Google announced in 2020 that it had budgeted US$1 billion (NZ$1.6b) over three years to licence content from publishers around the world in a step that was widely viewed as an attempt to stave off regulation globally.
In August, as part of that initiative, it struck deals with New Zealand Herald owner NZME and RNZ to purchase the right to use content supplied by them in its Google News Showcase app.
The two agreements, believed to be worth a total of a few million dollars a year, lets Google users freely browse a selection of news stories, including some paywalled NZME content, provided and curated by the publishers.
But the launch of Google News Showcase in New Zealand left other major media firms including TV3 owner Warner Bros Discovery, Stuff and TVNZ in the cold.
Jackson had signalled in August that Google’s deals with NZME and RNZ provided insufficient support to the media and that he was running out of patience, saying “we need as many agreements as possible and they need to be quality agreements”.
Earlier this month, the Commerce Commission gave other independent, locally-owned media outlets, including Stuff and Allied Press, permission to negotiate with Google and Meta as a block.
But to date, no further deals are believed to have been concluded.
