House mulls antitrust help for news industry citing Silicon Valley’s market dominance
Companies accuse technology firms of publishing content without compensation
WASHINGTON — Members of both parties Tuesday suggested legislation may be necessary for the financiallystruggling U.S. news industry as lawmakers began a bipartisan investigation into the market dominance of Silicon Valley companies.
At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, news media associations accused the tech companies of jeopardizing the news industry’s economic survival by putting out news content on their platforms without fairly compensating them for it.
“This is the first significant antitrust investigation undertaken by Congress in decades,” Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., the subcommittee’s chairman, said at the start of the hearing. The in
vestigation is long overdue, he said, and Congress must determine whether the antitrust laws “are equipped for the competition problems of our modern economy.”
Cicilline noted the steep layoffs in the news industry in recent years, saying the dominant position of the online platforms in the advertising market has created “an economic catastrophe for news publishers, forcing them to cut back on their investments in quality journalism.” At the same time, he said, tech platforms that are gateways to news online “have operated with virtual immunity from the antitrust laws.”
As a partial solution, Cicilline proposed legislation to establish an antitrust exemption that would allow news companies to band together to negotiate
revenue rates with big tech platforms. He called it “a life support measure, not the remedy for long-term health” of the news business.
The senior Republican on the full committee, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, said he backs Cicilline’s proposal. Addressing the broader question of antitrust, however, he said, “Big is not necessarily bad,” adding that lawmakers need to proceed cautiously.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, DSan Jose, one of the senior members of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview that she thought that a planned series of hearings on big tech could lead to a “healthy debate,” but warned that presidential candidates should avoid jumping to conclusions about whether big tech companies should be broken up.
“I think to have that as a talking point is quite premature,” Lofgren said. “There are candidates
who are scrambling to get a headline, I understand it … but that’s not the slogging work of congressional committees — we’re plugging along, looking at the law and facts.
“More than anyone else on the committee, I have tens of thousands of constituents who work in the tech industry, and it’s important to them that the economy be preserved,” she added.
Several Democratic presidential candidates think they have the solution: breaking up the companies on antitrust grounds. Cicilline has called that “a last resort,” but the idea has currency with both major political parties, including at the White House.
The head of an association that represents technology and telecom companies said the government scrutiny of successful companies is appropriate. However, an antitrust exemption for the news industry wouldn’t solve the problem, said Matt Schruer, vice president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
Before the internet, “news publishers received an exemption to deal with previous competitors like radio and TV news (and they) have not worked,” Schruer said. “The results were fewer choices for readers and less competition among news outlets.”
Stepping ahead of the criticism, Google’s vice president of news Richard Gringas said the company has “worked for many years to be a collaborative and supportive technology and advertising partner to the news industry.”
“Every month, Google News and Google Search drive over 10 billion clicks to publishers’ websites, which drive subscriptions and significant ad revenue,” he said in a statement Tuesday.