International Meeting Approves Global Principles for Platform Payments to Media Outlets

Dr. Courtney Radsch and Dr. Anya Schiffrin participated in Big Tech and Journalism – Building a Sustainable Future for the Global South, a conference held from July 13 & 14, 2023 at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg. Participants in the July 2024 Conference, “Big Tech and Journalism – Principles for Fair Compensation,” Johannesburg, South Africa Source After years of sluggish efforts to address the power imbalances between large social platforms, especially Google and Meta, a flurry of legislation aimed at making big tech pay for the news they use has emerged across the globe after Australia paved the way with its groundbreaking regulation in 2021. In a momentous international gathering of news leaders from more than 25 countries at the GIBS Business School in South Africa, participants adopted ten principles that should inform any public policy aimed at ensuring fair compensation, marking a turning point in the ongoing battle to rectify power imbalances between tech giants and news publishers.  Nearly a dozen countries including– Canada, Brazil, Japan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States– are actively working on legislation modeled on the landmark Australian News Media Bargaining Code that mandated tech companies negotiate fairly with news publishers for the use of their content on news aggregators and other services.   With AI becoming the top policy issue for leading economies, publishers are eager to ensure that any frameworks aimed at improving their bargaining power and ensuring that tech platforms are required to license…International Meeting Approves Global Principles for Platform Payments to Media Outlets