India to soon force Google, Facebook and others to pay for borrowing original content.
The Minister of State for IT and Electronics, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said India is currently thinking about make changes in content policies.
The process has already been adopted by countries including Australia, Canada, France and Spain.
Soon big tech companies like Google and Facebook will have to pay a price to the news publishers for using their original content. The government has hinted that it is mulling making big tech firms that are in the content business, such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and Amazon Pay the Indian newspapers as well as the digital news publishers a share of revenue for using their original content. The process has already been adopted by countries including Australia, Canada, France and Spain.
The Minister of State for IT and Electronics, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, said the government is currently thinking about revising the IT laws to facilitate the changes. “The market power on digital advertising that is currently being exercised by the Big Tech majors, which places Indian media companies at a position of disadvantage, is an issue that is seriously being examined in the context of new legalisations and rules,” Chandrasekhar told TOI.
Chandrashekhar added that the original content creators have not benefitted from the growth of social media and tech platforms in India but fail to share the revenue with the original content creators. “The news publishers have no negotiating leverage at all, and this needs to be tackled legislatively. This is an important issue for us,” he said. Only last year, Chandrasekhar had said that it has no plans to make the big tech companies pay for the local news.
Earlier this year, Australia passed a new media law to force big tech companies to pay for local news. Just before the new law came into effect, Facebook had blocked news content in Australia after a dispute with the government over paying for content. PM Scott Morrison had called Facebook’s move to ban news content in Australia “arrogant” and “disappointing”.
“The code will ensure that news media businesses are fairly remunerated for the content they generate, helping to sustain public-interest journalism in Australia,”Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said in a joint statement. They also said that the government was “pleased to see progress by both Google and, more recently, Facebook in reaching commercial arrangements with Australian news media businesses.”
After a fallout with the Australian government, Facebook blocked users from seeing and sharing news on its platform over a law that forces the tech company to pay the news publishers for using their content.
In May 2022, the Canadian government proposed a law to bring about fairness in sharing of revenue between digital news publishers and the social media platforms, including Google and Facebook.
It is necessary for such a law to come into effect because the companies earn revenue from news content published by media houses but they don’t share the revenue with the original creators.
