The head of Australia's competition watchdog said online giants like Facebook and Google need to have a new regulatory body that oversees their work and helps protect the future of independent journalism on Monday, according to Arab News.
Rod Sims, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), authored the report which said the market power by social media giants were having a major impact on Australian news media.
The report said even though the number of journalists employed by newspapers in Australia dropped 20 percent from 2014 to 2017 and print advertising revenues fell, Google and Facebook caught nearly 70 percent of all online advertising spending.
“This shift in advertising revenue online, and to digital platforms, has reduced the ability of media businesses to fund news and journalism,” Sims said in remarks prepared for delivery to Sydney’s International Institute of Communications on Monday.
“We cannot simply leave the production of news and journalism to market forces,” added Sims said.
He also noted while the platforms capture the advertising revenue, they are not offering any original news themselves.
“Rather they select, curate, evaluate, rank and arrange news stories produced by third parties,” Sims said while noting how it amplifies the “risk of filter bubbles and unreliable news on digital platforms.”
“Holding such critical positions in both the media and advertising markets results in special responsibilities,” he said.
The ACCC began its inquiry into the digital platforms last year and is currently accepting final submissions from industry players until the end of the week before it releases its final report in another four months.
But Sims indicated the later report would include calls for new regulations which would cover the tech giants, including their often opaque algorithms used in spreading news articles and videos.
“Virtually no media regulation applies to digital platforms and this contributes to the regulatory disparity between media sectors which would appear to provide the digital platforms with an unfair advantage,” he said.
Sims said a media regulator should have insight from those companies into how news is ranked in search results, including whether or not advertising spending helps increase that ranking, or if original news content ends up being drowned out by copycat stories or clickbait.
Sims was also joined by a British government-backed report from the Cairncross Review which called for a regulator to oversee the tech giants.
The report called for more action to help "nudge people towards reading news of high quality" but also supported tax reliefs to help local journalism flourish in the digital age.
The ACCC's report also suggested proposing tax offsets for people who subscribe to news media organizations that meet the regulator's quality standards.
The British report said a new Institute for Public Interest news could help channel public and private funding into the "parts of the industry it deemed most worthy of support."
"Their efforts should be placed under regulatory scrutiny - this task is too important to leave entirely to the judgment of commercial entities," the report said about Facebook, Google, and Apple.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Jacquelyn Martin
