Apart from India, other countries are also pondering making it mandatory for tech corporates to pay the media aggregators a part of their revenues.
Why should tech giants pay news media aggregators?
News publishers these days are witnessing disruptions in their digital output. The issue is two-way, for tech companies such as Google and Facebook, the case is that these platforms serve content created by news sites on their newsfeed and pages.
By doing this, these tech companies directly or indirectly monetise the resulting traffic, in other words, earn money using the content prepared and published by these news aggregators while the publishers get little cost for generating that content and thus demand the sites to share the revenues earned through them.
The second is that big tech has cornered so much of digital advertising (more than 90% of the share in most markets) that they exercise unfair pricing power and other advantages of scale that put publishers at a disadvantage.
Is this the first time the Centre has raised this issue?
Earlier this year, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) approached the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and accused Google of abusing using its dominant position.
Later, in March, the anti-trust body merged the two allegations and ordered an investigation into Google on this matter. In a letter, they asked the technology giant to compensate newspapers for using content published by them on its platform. It also sought a larger share of online advertising revenue.
