The next year will see alliances of news publishers around the world trying again to get payments from Google, and possibly Meta, influenced by the successes of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. These alliances will be useful for the negotiations that need to happen with AI companies using news content in their large language models. Google and Meta will continue to fight hard, threatening to drop news, hire lobbyists, and sign private deals with individual publishers.

A group of news organizations and academics met in Johannesburg in July 2023 to draft global principles for platform remuneration and called for transparency of agreements, commitments by publishers to use platform payments for news, and for inclusive agreements which include smaller outlets that have less bargaining power than big ones. Since then, publishers and governments around the world have continued efforts to get Google to pay more for news, knowing that the threat of regulation is helping them extract funds from Google.

The current asymmetric relationship between the news media industry and technological platforms, makes it easy for the platforms to abuse their market power to the detriment of the media. Platforms play the strategy of “divide and conquer” in every jurisdiction, sowing division amongst the various media players. These divisions have gradually made it harder for the media industry to receive fair compensation for the quality journalism it produces.

Our example, our recent Columbia University working paper, “Paying for News: What Google and Meta Owe U.S. Publishers,” found that the bilateral agreements between these platforms and news editors do not reflect a “fair and representative” payment for the value of media content. The report’s methodology suggests that platforms should pay US publishers between $11.9 billion and $13.9 billion annually. In Canada, publishers received far less than a fair price when they settled with Google in November 2023.

Platforms, tired of the multiple regulatory and reputational fronts arising from this asymmetry, are beginning to ditch their news distribution services. Some call it a new “post-Google” era for the news media, where traffic generated on Google, Meta, or X (formerly Twitter) is no longer the “golden metric.” Even so, we believe that Google and Meta are wedded to each other and tech companies need news more than they are willing to admit. If that weren’t so, why would they fight so hard against the new regulations?

It’s worth watching what happens in Spain. It passed a pioneering law in 2014, which introduced a so-called “Google tax,” modifying an existing intellectual property law to require news aggregators to pay publishers for linking to their content. It was removed in 2021 with the phasing in the European copyright Directive. However, Spain’s main publishers’ association, AMI, has now filed the first suit worldwide on behalf of all Spanish publishers against Meta before Spain’s commercial court for unfair competition.

Next year, we can expect more battles over platform remuneration and a lot of compromises as publishers again come up against the monopoly power of Big Tech.