Google and Meta Owe US Publishers $14 Billion a Year

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a lecturer who teaches on global media, innovation and human rights. Haaris Mateen is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Houston C.T. Bauer College of Business. Shutterstock With our co-authors, Dr. Patrick Holder and Dr. Haris Tabakovic, today we published a working paper that estimates the amount of money that Meta and Google should pay US news publishers for the value of the journalism and information they produce. Based on our analysis, we estimate that fair compensation by the platforms to US publishers would amount to as much as $13.9 billion a year. Background  The question of how to value content produced by news outlets and disseminated on social media and on search platforms has come to the fore as governments around the world press Google and Meta to pay for the news they disseminate. Australia led the way with its News Media Bargaining Code, passed in 2021, and Canada passed a similar law called C-18 earlier this year. Globally, similar laws are in consideration in at least a dozen other countries. In the US, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is stuck in the Senate, but still alive, and California’s Journalism Preservation Act is under active consideration in that state.  In response to what looks like a global movement to get tech firms to pay for the news that adds so much value to their products, Google and Meta have…Google and Meta Owe US Publishers $14 Billion a Year