‘Journalism Usage Fee’ Poised To Become California’s Latest Bad Policy

One-party control of state government can result in some spectacularly stupid pieces of legislation getting approved. California, where Democrats have long had trifecta control of state government, demonstrated how bad ideas can advance from the fringe to the floor with the so-called “Journalism Preservation Act.”

At bottom, this bill would require big online companies like Google and Facebook to pay California news outlets for the privilege of linking to their news stories. In other words, a “link tax.”

The bill’s intentions are to help news outlets cope with the collapse of ad revenue. That’s not a new problem – ad dollars have been fleeing traditional media for several years in favor of less expensive, more diverse, better-targeted online sources.

The result is many papers have closed, others have been greatly reduced in size, and only a handful, mainly large national outlets, have thrived.

Rather than adapt, many outlets have turned to the state to use its power to claw back money they think was unfairly taken from them.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has several choices words for the pols who are pushing such an intervention and the papers so eager to accept it:

Everything about this is filthy and corrupt. It’s literally [bill sponsor] Rep. Buffy Wicks and others in the California legislature saying “we’re forcing companies we dislike to give money to companies we like.” I mean, if that’s okay, think of how many other industries are going to be cozying up to Wicks and friends asking them to get other industries to simply fork over cash. It’s basically just laundering the corruption by literally forcing one set of companies to bribe others.

And that’s before we get to what’s most troubling about such state-enforced funding schemes:

There should also be pretty serious concerns about how this could bias reporting. The bill makes it clear that the amount media orgs get paid is entirely dependent on how much advertising revenue Google and Facebook make. Would you still expect critical reporting on their advertising programs when doing so directly could impact a large chunk of money going to your employer?

The legislation, then, is both profoundly troubling because it favors a few large news platforms over others and creates powerful incentives for news outlets toward biased coverage of their new revenue source.

And if the online search and social networks simply drop news links entirely? They would certainly be within their rights to do so. Facebook/Meta has already made clear it will shut down news links within California is the bill passes.

There’s also the lesson German publishers learned when Google News balked at paying a link tax. The company kicked those who wanted to be paid for links out of its news aggregator. The result was entirely predictable to anyone outside a newsroom: traffic to news sites collapsed.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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