from the whose-are-you-trying-to-help-here department
So we’ve talked quite a bit about the Journalism Preservation and Competition Act (JCPA), Senator Amy Klobuchar’s attempt to do Rupert Murdoch’s bidding and force successful Internet companies to send cash to media companies to… link to it. Yes, not only do news organizations want Google traffic, they also want to get paid. This whole scheme was dreamed up by Rupert Murdoch, who after decades of pretending it was free markets, began demanding that the government force internet companies to subsidize their own failures to innovate.
The nature of the JCPA is that it allows news organizations to join together in a cartel to “negotiate” with large Internet companies to force them to “pay” for “access” where access really means “link- us and send us the traffic they crave and are already using search engine optimization tactics to try to increase.” If the big Internet companies don’t agree to pay for this that doesn’t require payment (on the Internet, linking is and should remain essentially free), then the cartel can submit an amount it thinks it should pay to an arbitrator. The Internet company can submit its own alternative, but the umpire must choose, baseball-style, between one of the two submissions, and cannot choose anything else.
Two weeks ago there was a “markup” in which Klobuchar seemed to think he had a deal to get the bill out of committee and into the floor (although there have been no actual hearings to address the many, many project issues). However, Ted Cruz blew up the bill by attaching an amendment on content moderation.
Apparently, Klobuchar and Cruz spent the last two weeks negotiating, and now the bill is being re-marked after reaching an agreement…this seems to give Cruz and Trumpista disinformation peddlers exactly what what they want As Adam Kovacevich pointed out, the new language in the manager’s amendment says that in the “negotiation” Internet companies essentially can’t even raise content moderation issues.
The admin amendment adds this ⬇️ language in several places, which appears to be Cruz’s way of preventing platforms from engaging in content moderation against right-wing news:
In other words, Klobuchar folded Cruz’s anti-content moderation amdmt. 2/ pic.twitter.com/HZ4KGRDREW
— Adam Kovacevich (@adamkovac) September 21, 2022
Again, this gives a lot more power to Trumpist sites who can join, demand free cash from Google, and Google is prohibited from saying anything about content moderation issues. It’s … a weird thing for Klobuchar to be on board with, but he’s made it clear on this and other bills that he has no problem helping Trumpist websites if it means attacking Google and/or the open internet. They seem like strange priorities, but what do I know?
In fact, the Daily Caller, one of many pro-Trump sites, is already celebrating how the deal “protect the conservative media.” When Tucker Carlson’s publication cheers a Democrat’s bill for how it “protects the conservative media,” a sane Democrat might reconsider what they’ve done.
But not Amy Klobuchar! If it’s bad for Google, who cares if it helps Breitbart and the Daily Caller spread more bullshit. Great job, Senator.
The bill’s co-sponsor, Senator Kennedy, is now saying out loud that the bill prohibits content moderation by conservatives:
“We have reached an agreement that clarifies what the bill was designed to do: to give local media a real seat at the negotiating table and prohibit technology companies from throttling, filtering, deleting or curating content,” Kennedy’s office told the DCNF. “The only reason I can see parties opposing this bill is that they have a problem with healthy market competition or free speech.”
Kennedy’s final sentence is particularly ludicrous. Free speech includes (outside the 5th Circuit) editorial discretion. And this bill is a huge assault on editorial discretion in multiple ways. It limits the ability of websites to remove content they deem problematic. By forcing companies to pay for content that is literally free to link to, it effectively rewrites copyright law. Nor does it create “healthy competition in the marketplace,” when companies can’t even associate freely or not. There are so many reasons to oppose this bill.
As Kovacevich points out, the other big change is that the bill is even more explicit that they are negotiating on “price terms” rather than just terms. This is just doubling down on the fact that this is a tax, even when Klobuchar and the supporters of this bill (the news industry who will get free money out of it) pretend it’s not a tax.
In my original post about the bill, I had pointed out that there was no definition of “access” (the bill requires big tech companies to pay for “access”), which made no sense, since that this was the crux of the bill – that they were paying for “access” via links to sites. A proposed manager amendment that was approved last week included a definition of access, which said “the term “access” means acquiring, crawling, or indexing content.”
That… would have been really bad, because it means crawling and indexing might require a fee. That can’t be how anything works.
Interestingly, this new manager’s amendment no longer appears to include a definition for access.
So again, this bill looks like the worst of all worlds. It forces businesses to pay scammers for “access” to sites they may not even want to link to. And because of the weird baseball-style arbitrage here, we’re essentially setting up a system where big companies have to pay to do something that’s essentially free on the open internet.
This is a terribly dangerous bill. It takes a sledgehammer to a fundamental principle of the open internet… all to help Trumpist media scammers. Why is this bill coming from a Democratic Senator?
Filed under: amy klobuchar, crawl tax, index tax, jcpa, journalism, link tax, link, news, ted cruz
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