Yesterday, Google announced it would be blocking news from Canadian search results in response to Canada’s Online News Act, which passed into law last week. Inspired by Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, the act’s purpose is to correct the bargaining imbalance between digital platforms and news companies and allow the latter to negotiate payment for news content. Meta has also signalled it will block news in Canada, as it did here, an action which prompted significant amendments to the Australian code.
Changes may be afoot here as well. Last week, the Liberal Party said it will push the government to incorporate generative AI into the Bargaining Code, forcing AI companies to pay for their use of news content. Australia’s biggest news companies have been campaigning on this for several months, and it has the support of ex-ACCC chair Rod Sims, architect of the Bargaining Code, who has also been consulting with Canada on its legislation. Labor’s AI discussion paper doesn’t raise the issue.
Sims argues that the Bargaining Code would be a better way to get AI companies to pay than copyright law. The clearest case for this is where generative AI is used to rewrite news content and there is no direct link back to the original source. Google, for example, is testing a 'Search Generative Experience' (SGE) that provides an ‘an AI-powered snapshot of key information’ drawn from unacknowledged sources, though links may be provided to 'dig deeper'. Publishers worry that the tool will keep users on the Google page instead of sending them to the source, reducing their already-meagre slice of digital advertising revenue and increasing the platform's. A similar debate over the use of news snippets surrounded the development of the Bargaining Code.
During the development of both Australia’s Bargaining Code and Canada’s Online News Act, platforms argued the legislation would ‘break the internet’ by placing a price on links. This is a bit rich, of course, when the rise of digital platforms is founded on their ability to keep users in 'walled gardens'. Platforms essentially capture markets by monetising content they get for free.
The difference between using the Bargaining Code and copyright is that the code is restricted to news sources that produce public interest journalism (and, as we’ve written previously, this is not without its own issues). But that won’t help other publishers, who arguably have as strong a case as news media for worrying about decreasing traffic or unauthorised use of content. News has strong public interest value, of course, and it was the impact of the platform economy on public interest news production that the Bargaining Code was principally designed to address. It might well do the same for generative AI. But it would not be surprising if the latter drives broader changes to the regulation of the internet than can be achieved through the Bargaining Code alone.
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow
This article is from our fortnightly newsletter of 30 June 2023.
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