Big Tech is beating up on broadcast consolidation as it pushes back on a bill that would give broadcasters and other original news creators an antitrust exemption to negotiate with the tech giants that leverage that original content online.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association issued a pull-no-punches statement— the term “cartel” was used multiple times — following the Senate Judiciary Committee’s favorable referral of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (S. 673) to the Senate for a vote.
The CCIA said the bill would create a “news cartel” while failing to solve the issue of compensation for original news creation.
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The bill gives “news content creators” — print, broadcast or digital — an antitrust safe harbor to negotiate collectively with digital platforms like Facebook and Google for carriage of their original content.
While the idea behind the bill is that Big Tech is so big that broadcasters need the scale of joint negotiations to get fair compensation, the CCIA suggested the concentration shoe was on the other foot. “The Computer & Communications Industry Association has defended competition in the marketplace for 50 years and fought media consolidation and mergers including Comcast-NBC and Sinclair-Tribune,” it said.
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“The JCPA continues to be an unprecedented government overreach,” CCIA president Matt Schruers said. “It encourages the creation of a media cartel which will impose link taxes, and it threatens to hamstring digital services’ efforts to moderate dangerous content with ‘must-carry’ obligations.
“While objective journalism is critical to informing voters, inserting federal regulators into private sector business negotiations, mandating carriage of what the government thinks is ‘news,’ and promoting cartels is an irresponsible way to encourage an independent and robust news media,“ Schruers added. ■
