California bill to make Big Tech pay for news advances once again

A California costs that would make Big Tech spend for the news articles that help drive its profits has advanced out of a second legislative committee with bipartisan support as market critics increase opposition.

Assembly Bill 886, the California Journalism Preservation Act by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee unanimously on Tuesday with Riverside Republican Assemblyman Bill Essayli added as a co-author in addition to Los Angeles Democrat Josh Lowenthal.

" I do not believe in corporate well-being, I do not believe in transferring wealth," Essayli said at Tuesday's Judiciary Committee hearing. "But I also do not believe in unjust enrichment. And I do think Big Tech is being unjustly enriched off the backs of reporters."

The costs proceeds next to an Assembly floor vote, which hasn't yet been set up but must happen by June 2.

Wicks' expense follows the December collapse in Congress of a federal expense with comparable objectives, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, brought by U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican.

Sponsored by the California News Publishers Association, to which the Southern California News Group and its peers at the Bay Area News Group belong, AB 886 would require web platforms to utilize binding arbitration to identify the percentage of marketing revenue to compensate wire service for their material. Australia and Canada have actually passed comparable laws.

The bill is backed by a variety of print and broadcast wire service. In addition to its chief targets-- Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook-- it is opposed by the ACLU of California, the California Chamber of Commerce, California Taxpayers Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and some online news companies, including CalMatters.

Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Meta, Google, Twitter and Yahoo!, told the committee that tech business' usage of news material follows U.S. copyright law.

" The question here today is whether a healthy news sector is best attained by chaining its fate to aids from a handful of companies that are rooted in an unmatched necessary arbitration plan that switches on links, the building block of the internet," Schruers said. "Taxes and costs on links would overthrow the basic architecture of our connected economy and open the door to other tolls and charges and taxes on the complimentary and open internet."

Schruers added that comparable laws overseas haven't worked as planned.

Chamber of Progress, a politically progressive tech market advocacy group whose business partners consist of Google and Meta, stated it carried out a research study showing that Fox News and "disinformation outlets" would benefit most from such a "link tax."

Hal Singer, a University of Utah economics teacher and specialist in antitrust and customer defense matters, spoke in assistance of the bill, saying the proposal isn't a "link tax" and its arbitration provisions aren't that unusual. He noted it differs from the proposed federal law by needing 70% of proceeds to support newsroom journalists.

" The proposed intervention in this expense is modest," Singer told the committee. "News publishers are just requesting for a neutral arbitrator operating under auspices of the state to hear their evaluation of the annual value being appropriated by the platforms."

Essayli said that while he supports the expense, it will need to find a method to compare business like Google, which connects users with sites featuring topics they're searching for, and Facebook, which ranks photos, videos and posts in a user's news feed based upon who their pals are and whom they're following. Wicks agreed and thanked Essayli for his co-authorship.

" How you put that into the statute is the concern, but I'm devoted to figuring that out," Wicks stated. "We are going to continue to meet with opposition, there are going to be changes to this expense, but I truly desire this conversation to keep moving on since I believe it's important for our democracy that it does."