U.S. Publishers Seeking Bargaining Rights Against Facebook and Google

[engine]

The U.S. News Media Alliance, representing almost 2,000 news companies is lobbying Congress to allow it to negotiate as a group with the major news distributors, Facebook and Google, with the objective of getting better deals for the publishers.

"Legislation that enables news organizations to negotiate collectively will address pervasive problems that today are diminishing the overall health and quality of the news media industry," said David Chavern, President & CEO of the News Media Alliance. "Quality journalism is critical to sustaining democracy and is central to civic society. To ensure that such journalism has a future, the news organizations that fund it must be able to collectively negotiate with the digital platforms that effectively control distribution and audience access in the digital age."

[newsmediaalliance.org...]

Now that the landscape is more clearly defined, with Google and Facebook taking the high ground, will the Alliance get anywhere with this? Will Congress look favourably upon the publishers?

[mcneely]

I don't understand why this can even be a thing.

How many times has the industry (news in particular) shot down the Fairness Doctrine over the past 30 years? (compromising their own integrity)
They're proud to publish anything they want, true, false, or otherwise, and as long as the likes of Google was parsing, listing, and sending traffic their way, they didn't have a care in the world -- Their embellished titles, descriptions, thin content, and pagination was all that they needed to realize their dream.
The quality of their content has eroded significantly over just the past 10 years to the point of being absurd, and they cry because Google wants quality over quantity. Publishers can't sell ads because publishers aren't in the ad selling business (enter the adblockers), Google is, and if it wants to keep selling ads, it will want to start kicking these so-called publishers to the curb.

--- "Lets use the search engine for the free distribution of our weak content and page ads so we can kick back in the Bahamas without a care in the world" --- Doesn't sound like a very sustainable business model to me, but yet here we are.

Sounds to me like we need to build a better mouse trap, and just leave the likes of Google to it's muse.

[JS_Harris]

Another point of view: Today news sources scramble to try an get MORE content into Google but as Google brings automated news stories online and pushes hard to move from being a search engine to a voice answering company on mobile devices will these same news agencies suddenly see Google in a different light? Perhaps as a competitor since they no longer send traffic?

If/when that happens Google will face more and more issues while trying to access the very content they want to automatically reproduce or use in their voice systems, in my opinion.