Facebook’s new show of force in the copyright battle (*)
Those who expected that digital platforms would alleviate the financial difficulties of the mainstream press suffered a blow when the company Meta announced, on March 1st, the suspension of royalty payments (1) for the reproduction on the Facebook network of journalistic news published in newspapers, conventional radio and television news in Australia (2). This decision could change the worldwide debate on the regulation of Big Tech.
Facebook’s agreement with the Australian government, signed in 2021, was the first in the world in the category and served as a pretext for several other countries, especially Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, to adopt regulatory measures in the operations of digital platforms within their respective territories. It was also heralded as a victory for press conglomerates and a good number of small and medium-sized journalistic enterprises in the battle to preserve current regulations regarding copyright.
The decision by Meta, owner of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp networks, made it clear that Big Techs (large technology companies that control 90% of digital platforms) remain hegemonic in controlling interpersonal news flows on the internet by changing rules according to their interests. The decision by the mega-technological conglomerate founded and directed by Mark Zuckerberg only affects the Facebook News tab on the Facebook website where the network reproduced news published in the Australian press.
Only 3% of users regularly visit the Facebook News tab, representing a small portion of the network’s total audience in Australia, and consequently a tiny revenue. It was a demonstration of power in the long and global battle between Big Techs and the large journalistic conglomerates of the analogue era. Before the announcement of the suspension of royalty payments to the Australian press, Meta had already made it clear that it was no longer interested in journalism, claiming that it made little money from it.
Save yourself if you can
The collection of copyrights on journalistic news is at the centre of a major legal, economic, cultural and informational controversy because digitalization has undermined the foundations on which the concepts are based in force until now in the treatment of intellectual property. It will be a long and complex discussion whose outcome is unpredictable. What is really at stake in the confrontation between Big Techs and Big Press is money. Networks are earning billions of dollars annually, while journalistic conglomerates are fighting to prolong, for as long as possible, the survival of a business model that has lost efficiency.
The other big problem with the Big Press is that, especially in the Australian case, the agreement with the platforms was made directly with the journalistic conglomerates, especially the powerful News Corp group, owned by the billionaire Murdoch family. The Australian government has given the official seal to an essentially private deal between Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp icon that dominates the country’s press and controls major newspapers and TV networks in England and the United States. To date, details of the Facebook/News Corp agreement have not been fully disclosed.
The fact that the interests of a large corporation predominated over the press as a whole prevented small and medium-sized Australian journalistic enterprises from creating a movement against Meta’s “imperialism”. Local Australian newspapers received part of the royalties paid by Facebook, but it was a minimal share of the total. Even so, there are numerous cases of small journalistic projects that depend directly on payments.
The Achilles heel of the Big Techs
The new demonstration of power by the Meta Group, in a decision that had already been implemented in the United Kingdom, France and Germany last year, will probably be extended to all countries that try to regulate the earnings of digital platforms. For Big Tech, the reproduction of press material is a secondary issue because they know that social network users share the press material as part of the so-called relational information process, where news is incorporated into online conversation. News on social media is not a closed package on which a price can be charged as in the conventional press, but the result of hundreds and even thousands of interactions between users, in a continuous and uninterrupted process of producing new informative content.
But what the mainstream press is missing is the fact that when it insists on regulation of platforms focused on the payment of authorship rights it ignores the biggest weakness of Big Techs. All of its economic power comes from the unpaid appropriation of data posted by billions of ordinary people on social networks and search engines. This data is subsequently processed and analyzed by algorithms from large technology companies to support strategies for selling advertising space on the internet, the most profitable business in the world economy today.
This model of appropriation of information, today the most valued asset on the planet, tends to grow and feed an even greater concentration of economic power in the hands of the North American companies Meta, Alphabet (owner of Google and Youtube), Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, and the Chinese companies Baidu (search and artificial intelligence), ByteDance (owner of the Tiktok network), Alibaba (e-commerce), Tencent (owner of the WeChat network, the Chinese Facebook) and Xiaomi (cell phones). Alphabet, Amazon and Meta alone had net sales of almost a trillion dollars last year.
The foreseeable growth of the economic control of large technology companies over the use of information by humanity as a whole makes mandatory the debate on the creation of a social tax on the revenue of Big Techs. It is a way of redistributing the profit that platforms extract from other people’s data without appropriate compensation. This is data whose original owners are all of us and which fuels the fantastic revenue of no more than a dozen mega-companies. It is the best way to avoid the emergence of a planetary ‘corporatocracy’ (3).
(1) Royalties are a type of fee paid for the right to use, exploit or commercialize a good. This asset does not just have to be physical, like a product or space — it can also be a brand, a process, a song or even a technology. Royalties are charged on the revenue generated from the use of the asset.
(2) Payments will be suspended when the current contracts end. That is, there will be no renewal.
(3) ‘Corporatocracy is a neologism to designate the (hypothetical) exercise of political and economic power in a country through business corporations.
(*) Translated from a Portuguese original text, with the help of Google Translator and Grammarly
