Will Britain face down Facebook?
In February, Facebook pulled the plug on news in Australia after a dispute with the government there. Could the UK be the next battleground?
For five days in February, people in Australia experienced a version of Facebook that many may wish they could keep: all of the news had disappeared.
Following a dispute with the
Australian government over a proposed new law that would see tech giants paying a fee to link to news stories, Facebook pulled the plug on news. The blockade was expansive, hiding posts from Australian news outlets, and preventing Australians from linking to stories – even those from international outlets. It was one heck of a way to make a point.
It was, however, a fight that the Australian government appears to have won. By mid-March, both Facebook and Google, the two companies targeted by the “News Media Bargaining Code”, had signed licensing deals with the major news publishers in Australia, exactly as the law had intended.
So the big question now is does this set a precedent? Could Britain’s politicians shake down big tech too?
“My feeling is that because of the way in which they’re set up, I don’t think they pay a level of tax which is fair for the value of the business that they do,” Damian Collins, Conservative MP and former chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee told PC Pro.
Collins is a long-term critic of Facebook, and last year joined the self-styled “Real Facebook Oversight Board”, an independent monitoring group of figures from across the political spectrum. He doesn’t specifically call for Britain to adopt the same system as Australia, but he’s clearly sympathetic to the problem it is trying to address.
“We can see that the news industry has been very badly disrupted not by better news providers, but by the disruption of the advertising market,” said Collins, who is himself a former adman. “If they can’t make money from ads the way they used to, and their content is being shared for free through
platforms who then benefit from that commercially, then is that fair? And should there be some redress?”
Unsurprisingly, Facebook has pushed back hard against this characterisation. In a blog post, its VP of global affairs Nick Clegg argued that the Australian code is “like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car – and letting the stations set the price”.
Others have also criticised Australia, including web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who argues that the new law “risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online”.
But Collins thinks that the situation is analogous to other content licensing deals that already exist. “We already have in the music industry the idea that YouTube [should] make a contribution back,” he said, “I think the interesting question [is] for other publishers, for other content creators should there similarly be some sort of deal in place where funds are collected and distributed to compensate people for their content being shared?”
Could the UK be the next battlefield? At the end of last year, the government announced plans to create a new “Digital Markets Unit” as part of the UK’s competition regulator, which would be tasked with analysing the impact of big tech on other industries and markets.
“I think there’s this growing cross-party consensus that actually the companies do what suits them unless they’re required to do otherwise,” said Collins. “I don’t think every country in the world will literally come up with the same answer, but I think there’s a growing agreement on the problem.”