Freeloading digital platforms

The decades-long free use by digital technology companies of news and other materials prepared by print media may be coming to an end.

Last month, the parliament of Canada enacted the “Online News Act,” which requires internet-based search engines, e.g., Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook), to pay Canadian online news companies for access to their websites.

Under the pain of facing costly arbitration, the tech giants were ordered to enter into commercial arrangements with the newspapers to compensate them for the use of their materials.

The law aims to give financial support to Canadian newspapers whose revenues had suffered from the massive migration of advertisements to Google and Meta and, as a result, forced many of them to cease operations.

Earlier, for the same reason, the government of Australia had adopted “The News Media Bargaining Code” that compelled tech platforms operating in Australia to pay its local news producers for their content that are made available or linked to their platforms.

In retaliation to the Canadian law, Meta announced that users of Facebook and Instagram (which it also owns) in Canada will be blocked from viewing Canadian news.

Not to be outdone, the Canadian government said it would no longer buy advertisement space from them.

Unused to being regulated in their business operations, the tech giants are pushing back by holding hostage their users who have made their portals a convenient means to keep abreast with the news and, most importantly, to touch base regularly with their friends or preferred audience.

It is common knowledge that millennials and members of Generation Z consider their social media accounts and mobile phones as indispensable parts of their daily lives.

They would feel “naked” or isolated without them. As past incidents had shown, any disruption of their internet connection would send them into a frenzy.

Because of their global reach and glitzy formats, tech companies earn billions of dollars in revenues from advertisements that newspapers or print media used to depend on for their sustenance.

In fairness, advertisers cannot be faulted for making that shift because they have to go where their target markets are and digital communication has proven to be an effective means of reaching them.

The opposition by tech companies to sharing their wealth with print media is a clear case of freeloading, or using other people’s resources without giving them anything in return.

In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Taking advantage of the freewheeling nature of the internet, they use at no extra cost the products that newspapers had spent considerable time, money and effort to produce by the simple expedient of linking to their websites.

There is no question that those materials help increase or generate page views on the tech companies’ sites that advertisers take into account in deciding where to put their advertisements.

The tech companies’ sense of hubris about their global reach and influence may prove to be their undoing in other countries that may decide to share the position taken by Australia and Canada on giving financial assistance to their print media to keep them alive.

This action gains significance in light of the proliferation of misinformation and fake news in the unregulated social media, a problem that can be minimized through the print media which, by and large, operate under certain ethical journalistic standards. The countries in Europe that have expressed privacy concerns about the personal data that these companies routinely collate from their users may take a leaf from the actions taken by Australia and Canada.

Incidentally, the print media in the Philippines have not been spared the financial problems that had hit Canadian and Australian newspapers. INQ

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