The bill lets non-broadcaster news publishers demand a final-offer arbitration if their joint negotiation with a covered platform fails to result in an agreement after six months.
“The panel of arbitrators step in and decide which offer most closely approximates fair market value and wins,” said Coffey.
So, what has changed?
Publishers have fresh concerns now that AI tools are developing at a formidable pace, adding another dimension to the tensions already existing between big tech and publishers.
Lawmakers are aware of this fraught relationship. The bill continues to have bipartisan support, and as AI advances, the bill sponsors are eager to move it across the finish line.
Although its reintroduction spurred conversations around new provisions catering to AI, the bill is the same version that was passed out the Senate Judiciary markup, according to Coffey, which covers “access” or crawling of content, including AI.
“We’ve always considered AI in what we would want to be paid for,” said Coffey. “That wasn’t new to us.”
The bill will allow for fair compensation subject to individual publishers. This includes the revenue extracted from the platform’s views of a news publisher, including photos, summaries, snippets, data from readers, engagement, advertising against that content, use of content in AI and ad tech tax.
Okay, so what’s the concern?
While publishers get roughly an average of 27.72% % of their traffic on a trailing 12-month calculation from Google search, according to a small sample of 20 publishers from Parse.ly, there have been long-standing concerns, especially in Europe, that the content snippets visible in search engines lead to publishers receiving less traffic and generating less revenue.
As tech giants like Microsoft and Google’s version of AI search engines gain market muscle, this has further aggravated publishers in the U.S. who are already grappling for fair compensation from big tech.
If the bill passes, it could lead to an increase in publishers’ revenue and newsroom size. But, currently, there’s no unified protocol for publishers to make claims.
This sounds familiar. What are other countries doing?
A similar bill went into effect in March in Australia, called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. Publishers have been able to collectively extract hundreds of millions from platforms, as well as grow newsrooms, with the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists across the country. However, the exact details of where the money goes and who benefits are unclear.