A bill to make Google and Facebook owner Meta pay publishers for news they present on their platforms survived its passage through a state legislative chamber where potential laws often go to die.
Assembly Bill 886 would compel the technology giants to pay negotiated annual, lump-sum fees into a fund for news outlets, or enter mediation or arbitration and negotiate paying media companies a share of their digital-ads revenue.
On Thursday, the bill made it through the notoriously deadly suspense file hearing before the state Senate’s Appropriations Committee, passing 4-2, with Republican senators voting no.
Frequently, the majority of bills put in the suspense file quietly expire.
Negotiations over AB 886 involving news publishers, tech-industry representatives and legislators continue as it makes its way toward the August 31 deadline for the legislature to pass bills, according to the office of East Bay Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the bill’s author.
If passed, Gov. Gavin Newsom would have to sign or veto it by September 30.
A spokesman for Newsom said this week he “will evaluate this bill on its merits should it reach his desk.”
The bill, co-authored by assembly members Bill Essayli, a Riverside Republican, and Josh Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, passed the state Assembly in June 2023.
Many news publishers and some politicians blame Google and Meta for the thousands of newspapers closed in the U.S. since 2005. As news and advertising moved online and major internet platforms attracted vast audiences, publishers were essentially forced to allow their content onto the platforms with “little to no compensation,” Wicks has said.
Google hauls in 28% of digital advertising revenue worldwide, with Meta close behind with 23%, according to eMarketer.
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Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Houston in November released a paper estimating Google’s revenue connected to news media search results amounted to $21 billion a year. Meta gathers nearly $4 billion a year from news on U.S. Facebook feeds, the researchers said.
The California News Publishers Association — to which this news organization belongs — this week noted that a federal judge ruled last week that Google had an illegal monopoly on internet search. News coverage makes up 40% to 60% of Google’s search results, said the group’s top lawyer Brittney Barsotti said. The group blames market dominance by Google and Meta for the shrinking news media, and increased misinformation and “lack of credible and independent government watchdogs in communities across our state.”
Meta has said the vast majority of Facebook users do not come to the platform to consume news and political content, and that news on Facebook and Instagram “does not generate significant value for our users or our business.”
In a June hearing in the California legislature, Google’s vice-president of global news partnerships Jaffer Zaidi contended that AB 886 rests on a “flawed premise” that internet platforms appropriate news for profit without compensation. Google Search sends “billions of visits” daily to websites of news publishers of all sizes, giving them “valuable free traffic,” Zaidi said.
