News outlets want Congress to allow collective negotiations with Facebook, Google

A trade association representing hundreds of major media outlets is asking Congress to grant the press collective bargaining power to negotiate with Facebook and Google, two companies that have dominated the online ad revenue market.

The News Media Alliance (NMA) said on Monday that the two internet giants have been siphoning ad revenue away from news organizations around the country and that the industry should be able to have “concrete discussions” in order to secure better conditions.

“Legislation that enables news organizations to negotiate collectively will address pervasive problems that today are diminishing the overall health and quality of the news media industry,” David Chavern, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

{mosads}“Quality journalism is critical to sustaining democracy and is central to civic society. To ensure that such journalism has a future, the news organizations that fund it must be able to collectively negotiate with the digital platforms that effectively control distribution and audience access in the digital age.”

The NMA represents nearly 2,000 media outlets, including the publishers of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook and Google together rake in the majority of ad revenue generated on the internet, and critics such as the NMA say that they are profiting off the decline of the news industry.

The sites have also been accused of giving rise to the fake news phenomenon, and both have unveiled a number of reforms this year in an effort to crack down on the spread of misinformation.

“We’re committed to helping quality journalism thrive on Facebook,” said Campbell Brown, a former broadcast journalist who was hired by Facebook this year to oversee its partnerships with news outlets. “We’re making progress through our work with news publishers and have more work to do.”

A Google spokeswoman added in a statement, “We want to help news publishers succeed as they transition to digital.

“In recent years we’ve built numerous specialized products and technologies, developed specifically to help distribute, fund, and support newspapers. This is a priority and we remain deeply committed to helping publishers with both their challenges, and their opportunities.”

The NMA was one of the claimants behind the push that resulted in the record $2.7 billion antitrust fine that the European Union slapped Google with in June for elevating its own comparison shopping service over those of competitors in search results.

Facebook has also been fined and faces scrutiny over its consumer data practices in Europe.

The EU is reportedly preparing to hit Google with another record-breaking fine in the coming months in one of the two other antitrust investigations it has into the search giant’s mobile operating system and advertising practices.

The fine was a huge win for some U.S. organizations that have accused Google of using its dominance in the internet search market to hinder competitors by skewing search results. It came four years after the Federal Trade Commission under the Obama administration declined to take action against the internet search giant over similar anticompetitive concerns.

Riding the momentum of the EU victory, the NMA is hoping to get U.S. authorities to take action against the internet behemoths. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Sunday, Chavern said that while European regulators took action, the U.S. has “largely watched from the sidelines.”

Facebook and Google accounted for 58 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2016, and that figure is expected to rise slightly over the next two years, according to an analysis by eMarketer.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry’s decline in ad revenue has coincided with its increasing reliance on the internet for advertising dollars. From 2011 to 2016, digital advertising’s share of publicly traded newspapers’ ad revenue rose from 17 percent to 29 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

And the industry’s total advertising revenue in 2016 was just a third of what it was in 2006.

It remains unclear how much traction the NMA’s call for legislation will get in Congress. Democrats were largely silent in the wake of the EU’s Google fine and any antitrust intervention would be a tough sell for Republicans.

“We’re generally disinclined to expand antitrust exemptions,” an aide to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who chairs the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, told The Hill.

Matt Stoller, a fellow at New America, thinks that granting the NMA the exemption would be small consolation for the industry given how much antitrust officials in the U.S. have dragged their feet on dealing with the tech industry.

“The point of it is to say that if the government isn’t going to enforce the law against monopolistic platforms, at least give the victims the ability to protect themselves,” he said.