California Legislature Bribes Big Media Journalists With Big Tech Money To Support Link Tax Bill

Journalism

from the link-taxes-are-just-bad dept

A few months back, we wrote about California Rep. Buffy Wicks’ blatantly corrupt plan to use the California legislature to simply make Google and Facebook hand cash over to news orgs (the same news orgs she needs endorsements from to keep getting elected).

We’ve gone over the basics many times before: link taxes not only don’t make any sense, but they’re actively harmful to the open web. They’re based on a ridiculously confused understanding of basically everything. In short form: if any website does not want to get traffic from Google or Facebook, they have the power to control that by using robots.txt or redirects. It’s easy.

The problem is that they want the traffic. They want it so bad that they hire “search engine optimization” experts to help them get more traffic.

The problem is that they don’t just want the traffic, they also want to get paid for that traffic.

This is backwards in so many ways. It’s basically saying that they should get paid to have other companies send them traffic.

It also breaks the most fundamental concept of the open web — the link — by saying that the government can force some websites to pay for linking to other websites (and, on top of that, force the paying websites to have to host those links, even if they don’t want to).

Everything about this is filthy and corrupt. It’s literally Rep. Buffy Wicks and others in the California legislature saying “we’re forcing companies we dislike to give money to companies we like.” I mean, if that’s okay, think of how many other industries are going to be cozying up to Wicks and friends asking them to get other industries to simply fork over cash. It’s basically just laundering the corruption by literally forcing one set of companies to bribe others.

And, the reality is that (as we saw elsewhere with these link taxes) the biggest beneficiary will be Rupert Murdoch. It makes you wonder why a Democrat like Buffy Wicks is looking to support Murdoch, but that’s the end result. Since the payments will effectively be based on the size of the news organization, the biggest news organizations will really clean up here.

A recent study by the Chamber of Progress noted that the biggest beneficiaries of the CJPA will be Fox News and the NY Post: two properties owned by Rupert Murdoch. Supporters of the bill have attacked this study by saying that Chamber of Progress is a big tech lobbying org, but even if you think that’s accurate, it seems you should still have to respond to the actual data here:

Yes, Fox News needs to pay Dominion a lot of money, but it’s not exactly a struggling news organization.

Of course, another major beneficiary is the hedge funds buying up local newspapers and strip-mining them for cash.

On top of that, there are serious concerns about the 1st Amendment destroying “must carry” effect of the bill. The law says that Google and Facebook “shall not retaliate against an eligible digital journalism provider for asserting its rights under this title by refusing to index content or changing the ranking, identification, modification, branding, or placement of the content of the eligible digital journalism provider on the covered platform” which means that so long as you apply to get included in this payout scheme, Google and Facebook can’t downrank you.

Which means that all of the disinfo peddlers are totally going to participate just to make sure that if they’re downranked for other reasons they can totally play martyr and use this law to force themselves back up in the rankings.

Earlier this week, Wicks and others in the legislature made some amendments to the bill, which they claim answer some of these concerns — mainly trying to address the claims that the billionaire owners of these media properties will just pocket the money. The original bill said that 70% of the funds received had to be invested in “journalism jobs” and the amended version of the bill provides a few more details. It says that media organizations seeking to get cut into this corrupt bribe need to provide details of their “plan” to comply with the requirement to use 70% of the funds on “news journalists and support staff.”

But that doesn’t actually fix any of the underlying issues. It just clarifies what was already in the bill, and makes it much more convoluted and complex. And, even so, it still allows 30% to go to Murdoch, hedge fund dudes, etc.

The bill also makes it clear that small publications need not apply, only the rich wealthy ones. Publications that make less than $100k per year are not eligible, so independent journalists or small one or two person journalism outfits are cut out of the deal. Hell, Techdirt would likely be excluded. Remember, we took ads off our site a few years ago, partly because other laws, including California’s privacy laws meant that it was too big of a liability for us to offer ads. So, it’s not clear that we meet the qualifications of making revenue from our publishing activity (in part because of other California laws). California seems to be very carefully deciding which orgs can get this payout and which ones (like us) cannot. And that also seems like a major 1st Amendment concern. The government picking and choosing which journalism orgs get cut into the corruption seems… problematic?

There should also be pretty serious concerns about how this could bias reporting. The bill makes it clear that the amount media orgs get paid is entirely dependent on how much advertising revenue Google and Facebook make. Would you still expect critical reporting on their advertising programs when doing so directly could impact a large chunk of money going to your employer?

On top of that, there was a change to pretend to deal with the “must carry propaganda nonsense” by adding the following: “This section does not prohibit a covered platform from, and does not impose liability on a covered platform for, enforcing its terms of service against an eligible journalism provider.” But, now you have to litigate that. Because every news org that is downranked or removed will claim it’s retaliation, and then it becomes a fight over who a court believes. That, alone, will make it so that Google and Facebook are less willing to bother enforcing their own rules to stop nonsense peddlers, because it’s now a liability.

Again, it makes you wonder why Buffy Wicks, a Democrat, is trying to help disinformation peddlers, who frequently support Republicans, remain at the top of the results in Google and Facebook.

But, unfortunately, it looks like the amendments — which are effectively Buffy Wicks bribing big media companies with money from big tech companies — are working to convince some journalists. Matt Pearce is an excellent reporter for the LA Times, and one who was, in the past, critical of attempts to do a link tax at the national level, the JCPA, highlighting how it was media orgs “begging Congress for a handout.” He tweeted dozens of times about the problems of the JCPA.

Just a few months ago, he was the lead signatory on a letter to Congress talking about how the JCPA was problematic. But, as soon as the California version was amended to make news orgs document how the money would be spent, Pearce supported it. It comes off as “it’s okay to break the open internet with link taxes, so long as we get our cut.”

It’s not a good look.

Yes, some media orgs have struggled to adapt to the internet, and yes, journalism (especially local journalism) is critical. But this corrupt, anti-internet approach is not the way to do it, and it’s a bad look for journalists to only say it’s okay once their own beak is wet as well.

This entire scheme is problematic. No one should support it just because they’re getting paid.

Filed Under: bribery, buffy wicks, cjpa, corruption, journalism, link tax
Companies: facebook, google