Report: Facebook, Google news should be regulated
Aregulator should oversee tech giants like Google and Facebook to ensure their news content is trustworthy, a governmentbacked report suggested.
The Cairncross Review into the future of the UK news industry said such sites should help users identify fake news and “nudge people towards reading news of high quality”, BBC reported.
It also backed tax reliefs to encourage the provision of local journalism.
In addition, the report called for a new Institute for Public Interest News.
Such a body, it said, could work in a similar way to the Arts Council, channeling public and private funding to “those parts of the industry it deemed most worthy of support”.
The independent review, undertaken by former journalist Dame Frances Cairncross, was tasked with investigating the sustainability of high-quality journalism.
Its recommendations include measures to tackle ‘the uneven balance of power’ between news publishers and online platforms that distribute their content.
Services like Facebook, Google and Apple should continue their attempts to help readers understand how reliable a story is, and the process that decides which stories are shown should be more transparent, it said.
“Their efforts should be placed under regulatory scrutiny — this task is too important to leave entirely to the judgment of commercial entities,” according to the report.
A regulator would initially only assess how well these sites are performing, but if they are not effective, the report warned “it may be necessary to impose stricter provisions”.
Yet the report fell short of requiring Facebook, Google and other tech giants to pay for the news they distribute via their platforms.
‘Draconian and risky’
Dame Frances told the BBC’S media editor Amol Rajan that such ‘draconian and risky’ measures could result in firms like Google withdrawing their news services altogether.
“There are a number of ways we have suggested technology companies could behave differently and could be made to behave differently,” she said.
“But they are mostly ways that don’t immediately involve legislation.”
The report instead recommended ‘new codes of conduct’ whose implementation would be supervised by a regulator “with powers to insist on compliance”.
Other recommendations included an exploration of the market impact of BBC News conducted by broadcasting regulator Ofcom, expanding financial support for local news by extending the BBC’S Local Democracy Reporting Service as well as an investigation of the online advertising market, conducted by the Competition and Markets Authority, to ensure fair competition.
One local newspaper editor welcomed the report’s recommendations while suggesting the report “comes too late for so many once proud and important community newspapers”.
The Yorkshire Post’s James Mitchinson said, “The various fiscal reviews and recommendations... must come quickly... if we are to turn the Cairncross Review into something which we look back upon as being instrumental in preserving what we do for generations to come.”
UK’S Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright said some of its suggestions could be acted upon ‘immediately’, while others would need ‘further careful consideration’.
Shadow Culture Secretary Tom Watson urged the UK government to tackle Google and Facebook’s ‘duopoly’ in the digital advertising market, and said Dame Frances was ‘barking up the wrong tree’ in recommended an inquiry into the BBC’S online news output.
Meanwhile, former director general of the BBC Greg Dyke defended the role of the corporation.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today program, “It seems to me that at a time when large American media companies — the likes of Netflix and the rest of it — are going to come to dominate in the world, for the BBC to be cutting back on anything will be a mistake.
“The importance of the BBC is going to grow in the next 10 years, not decline.”