What is the NMA doing about it?
The News Media Association has presented these concerns to Ministers, Parliamentarians and regulators and for many years led the way in calling for the Competition and Markets Authority to undertake a market study into the digital advertising marketplace.
Published in July 2020, and repeatedly citing NMA evidence, the report laid bare the “exploitation” of commercial relationships with news media publishers by Google and Facebook, which the CMA said was likely to lead to consumer harm as publishers were less likely to be able to monetise their content.
The NMA welcomed the Government’s response to the study and the announcement that it will set up a Digital Markets Unit, which the NMA had campaigned for.
The DMU will begin work in April and sit within the CMA to oversee a “pro-competition regime” for platforms including those funded by digital advertising, such as Google and Facebook.
As part of the work, a new code will be introduced to govern commercial arrangements between publishers and platforms to help keep publishers in business - helping enhance the sustainability of high-quality online journalism and news publishing in the UK.
The NMA has also been working with publishers overseas and closely monitoring developments in other key marketplaces. In Australia, the Government has introduced the News Media Bargaining Code to govern relationships between the tech platforms and the publishers, which could inform the development of the code in the UK.
The welcome acknowledgement of the principle of paying publishers for the news content they produce has led to publishers striking deals with the tech platforms.
But the deals in no way diminish the urgent need for a robust regime, underpinned by legislation, to level the playing field between the platforms and the publishers, and the NMA continues to campaign for the legislation to be brought forward as soon as possible. It is vital that the new regime delivers significant benefit to both small and large publishers alike and the new regime will help deliver this.
The NMA is also campaigning hard for robust and complete exemption for news media from the new regime designed to crack down on online harms promulgated by the tech platforms.
As well as news publishers’ websites, which the Government has already confirmed will be out of scope, this exemption must include trusted journalistic content which appears on social media platforms, and user comments made on news media sites.