On September 27, 2023, the Center for Journalism & Liberty at the Open Markets Institute convened policymakers, experts, and practitioners from the U.S. and Canada for a highly valuable discussion on the path forward for sustaining our countries’ independent news media as a condition of healthy democracies.
Visiting from Canada to speak at the event, Minister Pascale St-Onge, Minister of Canadian Heritage, shared her experience implementing Canada’s groundbreaking news media compensation law, the Online News Act, despite considerable pressure from tech giants Meta and Google to block such solutions.
Minister St-Onge stressed that the big tech giants must “contribute their fair share and support democracy...We know they won’t regulate themselves.”
This is precisely why the Canadian government (similar to the Australian government, European Union nations, and others to come) prioritized passing and now implementing their news media bargaining law: to stop the bleeding for news publishers and compel Big Tech to come to the table and agree on fair compensation.
Minister St-Onge was resolved that the Canadian government will not bow to pressure from Meta and Google – to intimidation tactics like Meta’s pulling news from feeds across Canada – and urged countries around the world weighing similar legislation to stand united because democracy is at stake.
Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty noted that “the crisis facing journalism is not a problem of the news industry’s own making. It’s a result of legal regulatory frameworks that privilege tech platforms over the press, and give them unfettered power to set the rules.”
Professor of law at the University of Michigan, Sanjukta Paul, a renowned antitrust expert, reminded us that America's antitrust tradition permitted and encouraged smaller and weaker parties, such as farmers and artisans, to come together to build power and govern markets. This was in harmony with promoting fair competition among firms. Accordingly, allowing news media to cooperate and collectively contest the power of monopolistic digital platforms, as Canada’s online news law and proposals in the U.S. advance, is not new or unprecedented but consistent with antimonopoly policy and practice. Further, no such forum currently exists for media and tech to settle these debates; bargaining laws are a fair way to close this gap.
Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn also offered legal precedent for intervention to protect a free and independent press, citing Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black: “Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private Interests.”
On the sidelines of the event, Minister St-Onge connected with U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, our other keynote speaker, who is the author of the U.S. Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), legislation with similar goals to the new Canadian law. This was, we believe, a very valuable meeting of the minds that we hope will pay dividends in both countries’ work to generate the structural reforms needed for freer, fairer online ecosystems and sustainable independent news.
We also shared video remarks from California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who is fighting tirelessly to make California the first U.S. state to pass a fair news bargaining law. Assemblymember Wicks, along with featured panelists such as Regina Brown Wilson, Executive Director of California Black Media; Julian Do, Co-Director of Ethnic Media Services; Amy Awad, Director General of Canada’s Digital and Creative Marketplace Frameworks; and Suzanne Nossel, CEO, PEN America, each made important points about how we must prioritize sustained funding for smaller local and ethic media, and media that delivers value for other identity-based communities, like LGBTQ+. News media bargaining codes are one step forward, but there are additional solutions we must also explore.
Many of our speakers emphasized the essential labor roles of the people who bring us the news, including Minister St-Onge, Jon Schleuss, President of The NewsGuild-CWA, and Rachel Oswald, a CQ Roll Call reporter. Senator Klobuchar reflected on the value her own father brought to his community as a long-time, beloved sports reporter and columnist.
Senator Klobuchar was optimistic that despite the usual political divides and setbacks, we are seeing progress nationally, with policymakers more resolved than ever to regulate Big Tech, in U.S. states like California and others, and internationally, in Canada and Europe.
As Barry Lynn said in his closing remarks: “We will win. We are already winning.”
Collectively, the September 27th event put Big Tech on notice: policymakers, activists, journalists, and more, from many different countries and backgrounds, are united in the urgent need to find sustainable solutions for the news -- that includes requiring Big Tech to pay their fair share.
During the event, the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets announced the publication of its comprehensive report, “Democracy, Journalism, and Monopoly: How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century.” A tremendous effort from Open Markets and CJL journalists and scholars, this new report – the most comprehensive available today – details how, through a broad & integrated program of reform that restores traditional American principles of competition policy, we can restructure media & communications markets to sustain them in the 21st Century.
The Center for Journalism and Liberty also launched the Tech & Media Fair Compensation Frameworks tracker, which includes information about legislation around the world to address power imbalances between Big Tech and the press, plus several sets of policy primers and analyses.
Special thanks to the News/Media Alliance for cosponsoring the event. And to the creators of the film, “The Cost of Convenience,” for permitting us to share a clip of their feature-length documentary exploring how internet platforms are exploiting human rights.
WATCH OUR EVENT RECAP HERE:
