That's not just a hypothetical risk: in #Canada, Big Tech entered into negotiations with the *#TorontoStar* - the country's widest-circulating paper - ahead of a proposed #NewsBargainingCode that was working its way through Parliament. Once that settlement was reached, the *Star* abruptly killed "Defanging Tech" its *excellent* critical series on the tech giants it had just climbed into bed with:

thestar.com/news/big-tech.html

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Defanging Big Tech | News | The Star

Defanging Big Tech is an ongoing series examining the challenge for governments to regulate tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.

^{Toronto Star}

Another important risk from "bargaining codes" and link taxes is that they tend to favor the largest and/or most sensationalist news companies, who have the leverage to bargain for the highest sums. In Australia, #RupertMurdoch's #NewsCorp bargained for a sizable payment from the tech sector - but then it laid off its news workers. Merely transferring money to media giants doesn't mean an increase in investment in news.

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That's especially true in the Canadian context, where a US vulture-capitalist fund bought out the #NationalPost and its nationwide affiliates and then loaded the chain up with debt, while hacking newsroom staff to the bone and beyond. There's no reason to think that tech payments to the *Post* will go anywhere except to the financial speculators who are its major creditors.

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Meanwhile, the proposed US version, #JCPA, has a payout schedule based on the number of clicks a news outlet generates for each platform - a metric that will see the lion's share of money going to the far-right clickbait sites that push conspiracy theories, disinformation, and culture-war nonsense - and see floods of social media traffic as a result.

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Any solution to the tech/news conflict should benefit *the news*, and the workers who produce it - not the shareholders of the giant companies whose short-sighted consolidation, mass firings, and sell-offs of physical plant created the hyper-concentrated, brittle news sector of today:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/soc…

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Luckily for the news, there's a whole bushel of policy levers we can yank on to make the news better, stronger, and more sustainable, even as tech monopolies and the surveillance they rely on are consigned to the scrapheap of history.

In this series - which will publish weekly over the next four weeks - I'll dig into four policy prescriptions for making a better news that is free of Big Tech, not dependent on it:

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I. Break up ad-tech: Following the lead of Senator #MikeLee's #AMERICAAct, we must end the ad-tech sector's self-dealing. Ad-tech scoops up 51% of every ad-dollar. That's thanks to the ad-tech companies practice of offering marketplaces in which they represent both advertisers *and* publishers: that's like a game where the referee pays the salaries of the head coaches for *both* teams.

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If we pare back the ad-tech tax to, say 10% and split the difference between advertisers and publishers, then every publisher will see an immediate 20% increase in their top-line revenue, without having to "bargain" for a "voluntary" payment from tech companies.

II. Ban surveillance ads: America is long overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action. When we finally get such a law, surveillance advertising is *dead*.

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Ad-tech has long argued that people like ads, so long as they're "relevant," a state that can only be attained through continuous, invasive surveillance. In reality, no one consents to surveillance - which is why, when #Apple gave its users a one-click opt-out from spying, 94% blocked spying (unfortunately, Apple only blocks its competitors from spying on Apple customers; even if you opt out of spying on your Apple device, *Apple* will continue to spy on you).

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The natural successor to surveillance ads is #ContextAds: ads based on the content you're looking at, not the surveillance data an ad-tech platform amassed on you without your consent. Context ads are intrinsically better for publishers: no publisher will ever know as much about a reader's *behavior* than a spying ad-tech platform, but no ad-tech platform will ever know as much about a publisher's own content than the publisher does.

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That means that the benefits of a ban on surveillance ads wouldn't just be an end to creepy internet spying - it would also transfer power from tech companies to news companies, online performers and other creative workers.

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IV. Make social media #EndToEnd: Tech platforms' predictable #enshittification strategy always ends with publishers no longer being able to reach their subscribers unless they pay to "boost" their content. Social media companies claim to be facilitators of the connection between publishers and audiences, but in reality, they take those audiences hostage and ransom them off to publishers.

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An end-to-end rule for social media would require platforms to reliably deliver material published by accounts to their own followers, who asked to see that material.

The debate over news and tech starts from the erroneous - and dangerous - assumption that the platforms are stealing the news media's content, by letting their users talk about, quote and link to the news. This isn't theft: if you're not allowed to talk about the news, then it's not the news - it's a secret.

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The platforms *are* stealing from news, though: they're not stealing content, they're stealing *money*. Between sky-high ad-tech rakes, app store taxes, and ransom demands to reach your own subscribers, the tech companies have grabbed the majority of money generated by news workers and the companies they work for.

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Ending this theft will produce a more sustainable and robust source of funding for the news - without compromising news companies' ability to aggressively hold tech to account, and without propping up financialized, hollowed-out media monopolies at the expense of an independent press.

--

Image:
EFF
eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/savi…

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

eof/

Saving the News From Big Tech

Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}