California lawmakers are abandoning an ambitious proposal to force Google to pay news companies for using their content, opting instead for a deal in which the tech giant has agreed to pay $172 million to support local media outlets and start an artificial intelligence program.
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The first-in-the-nation agreement, announced today, promises $175 million for local journalism across California over the next five years, but represents a significant departure from the bill pushed by news publishers and media employee unions earlier this year.
Instead of Google and Meta being forced to negotiate usage fees with news outlets directly, Google would deposit $55 million over five years into a new fund administered by UC Berkeley to be distributed to local newsrooms — and the state would provide $70 million over five years. Google would also continue paying $10 million each year in existing grants to newsrooms.
The Legislature and the governor would still need to approve the state money each year; the source isn’t specified yet. Google would also contribute $12.5 million each year toward an artificial intelligence “accelerator” program, raising labor advocates’ anxieties about the threat of job losses.
Publishers who initially pushed for the proposal forcing Google to pay them said the deal was still a win. The UC Berkeley fund will be overseen by news industry groups; the money will be distributed according to the number of journalists employed at each publication, with some reserved for smaller or ethnic media outlets.
“This is a first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term, and we will push to see it grow in future years,” Julie Makinen, board chairperson of the California News Publishers Association, said in a statement.
In an interview, Makinen said that the deal was “not what we had hoped for when set out, but it is a start and it will begin to provide some help to newsrooms across the state.”
“Sometimes, the political realities, they are what they are,” she said. “And there’s many of them in this state and in this election year.”
Unions representing media workers accused the news companies and lawmakers of settling for too little.
Senate Democratic leader Mike McGuire, whose chamber earlier this year passed a bill “to hold Big Tech companies accountable for the profits they make off” linking to news articles, also raised concerns. In a statement, he said the deal “lacks sufficient funding for newspapers and local media, and doesn’t fully address the inequities facing the industry.”
The agreement replaces two bills lawmakers had pursued the last two years as they tried to secure a cut of tech money to prop up California’s struggling local news industry. Following a nationwide trend, media companies have hemorrhaged jobs over the past two decades as advertisers fled print media for the internet and technological advancements reshaped how readers consume news. The state has lost one-third of its newspapers since 2005 in a trend experts say worsens civic engagement, polarization and misinformation.
To try to keep their readers, publications increasingly rely on social media and online search. Google controls the lion’s share of search in a way the U.S. Justice Department and one federal judge have said violates antitrust law.
The proposals to impose fees on Google’s use of news content in its search results prompted a flurry of tech company lobbying. In the past 18 months, for instance, Google spent more than $2.1 million lobbying lawmakers against those bills and others — more than triple what it spent in the same time period two years earlier, according to a CalMatters review.
The first bill, introduced in February 2023 by Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, would have required platforms such as Google and Meta to either pay a fee or negotiate with news outlets for using their news content.
It was sponsored by the news publishers association, whose members include major newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. (CalMatters is also a member.) The bill passed the Assembly last year, but Wicks paused it to try to bridge a split among media companies over how the money would be divvied up.
You know, it is soooooooo tiring to see more and more of this junk created by Democrats.
How about this for a easy solution? Every news story is logged in central clearing house. every access spins off a 10% payment.
After repeated reference, it drops to 5% and then repeated use drops to2%.
There you go no government…..easy down….
Cost of doing business.