‘Suck it and see’ or face a digital tax, former ACCC boss Allan Fels warns Google and Facebook
Andrea Carson and Andrew Dodd speak to the former chair of the ACCC, a professor, and the CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative to discuss the Google versus news publishers and ACCC stoush, in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Have you used Google lately and been greeted by a yellow warning saying that the way Australians search on Google is under threat?
To understand why these messages are appearing, Media Files interviewed former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Professor Allan Fels, and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI), Anna Draffin.
Isn’t that actually the right answer. All of the discussion on the importance of journalism to democracy, which is very compelling, seems to lead to a conclusion that a public good needs public funding. Public funding is funded through taxes largely. A fair tax allows “super-profits” to be redirected to public good services like Journalism. The problem is, this approach benefits all Australians equally, which would be seen as herecy to one or two of our largest media organisations (well one really).
The problem is the ACCC has recommended achieving this through a shakedown. Even more concerning, they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the interweb works. The shakedown not only funnels money towards the largest media organisations only, in one of the most concentrated media markets in the world, it also proposes ridiculous demands on Google that would essentially allow these large media organisations to have an unfair competitive advantage against EVERYONE else.
This isn’t a problem of different bargaining positions. The ACCC has fundamentally failed getting to this view. Ask any advertiser and they will tell you the FB and Google ads products work better and deliver better results. Local news organisations aren’t at a competitive disadvantage because of scale, they are competing with better ads products. They are really competing with a legacy of giving away the one ad model they had that did work effectively, the true rivers of gold that funded advertising historically, classifieds ads for jobs, cars and houses.
The cost will just get passed on to the consumer, other publishers will take the opportunity hike prices to try to regain margins and things will normalise with the same spend shares as before, but with mostly medium and large business shouldering the burden.
Pointless and arguably self destructive.
Should the ‘code’ not just be fair for every news publisher?
It doesn’t make any sense to me that the ABC for instance does not fall into the ‘code’ but News Limited does.
The news is used in exactly the same way – and this would benefit any new comers.
It feels very biased to the big end of town and not future focussed at all.