Friday, March 29, 2024

How long before Google starts paying Indian news publications for its content?





Keep a watch on what’s happening with Google. It just has agreed to pay news publications in France for their content it shows in its search engine. On the same issue though, it’s fighting with Australia to the extent its threatening to withdraw from the Continent. Why?

Before we get into Whys, lets’ see how Australia has reacted. It’s prime minister Tim Morrison is livid that the tech giants is screwing up his nose at the country’s lawmakers. The battle lines are drawn. As it soon would be in other countries including India. 

These tech giants call themselves aggregators of news, and get to use the content created by media organisations for free via their search engines. This has created a peculiar problem for most media houses worldwide as they feel a meltdown. With sinking advertisement revenues and other problems, many have been forced to shut shop.

Between the traditional media houses and these tech giants, it sure is an uneven battle with an overwhelming advantage enjoyed by the latter. The Australian government has stepped in, taking cudgels on behalf of the weaker side. It wants Google to pay for the content of media houses it uses.

Melanie Silva, the top Google boss for Australia and New Zealand, made an interesting argument in the Senate hearing. She said people could imagine recommending a few cafes to a friend, and then getting a bill from the cafes for sharing that information.

The argument can at best to termed disingenuous and it is not as simple as that. The fact is that the tech giants tweak the content in its presentation, and that helps them make piles of money. Conversely, it also causes harm to some as the selection and presentation of content is not as objective as Google and Facebook would persuade us to believe. Playing favourites in the digital world is a norm, and not an exception but tech giants would have use believe otherwise.

“It is often in reframing that advertisements appear, and this is where these platforms make money,” one commentator specialising in internet studies remarked. 

Countering Melanie’s argument, lawmakers and experts dealing with formulation of public policy say the companies do not just share information like friends do about cafes. These companies harvest details about their users and then utilise that information to make profits. 

“It is about the external process being imposed on them (read tech giants) by legislation, rather than by them just being able to file out deals as they see fit,” said Peter Lewis, Director of the Center for Responsible Technology at the Australian Institute, ab independent research group.

He hit the nail on the head as he added: “It shifts the balance of power from their hands to a third party, and that is what they can’t countenance.”

Going a step further in his attempt to demolish Melanie’s argument, Lewis said what the tech giants do is they don’t just give you information about where to get coffee. What they do next is to follow you to the cafe, watch what you order, and where you go next. After collecting all this information about your preferences, they sell that knowledge to companies that want to market many things other than coffee.

Senator Rex Patrick accused Google of trying to falsely pretend and imply that it was concerned about “technical precedence”. The fact was that what weighed with Google was “commercial precedence”, money in simple words.

Incidentally, India is one of the biggest users, second only to China, of the digital tools and technologies. The race for further digitisation is going unabated but the government presently has little, if any control, or regulations in place for the tech giants. This is an unchartered territory as of now but the need to regulate and conform to the local laws and sensitivities cannot be overemphasised. 

Given that, what happens between Google and the Australian lawmakers will be keenly watched here in India too. With internet becoming faster, and becoming more powerful, its effective regulation by way of dissemination of contents is a foregone conclusion.


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