A bipartisan bill to make Google and Facebook pay news companies whose stories appear on their platforms to help the struggling media industry faced its first test in the state Senate Tuesday evening when it passed 9-2 out of the Judiciary Committee.
Supporters include a number of news publishers and organizations including the California Broadcasters Association and the California News Publishers Association, to which the Bay Area News Group belongs. Google’s vice-president of global news partnerships Jaffer Zaidi argued to the committee that the bill rested on a “flawed premise” that internet platforms grab news for profit without compensation. Google Search sends “billions of visits” daily to websites of news publishers of all sizes, giving them “valuable free traffic,” Zaidi said.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Houston released a paper in November that estimated Google’s revenue linked to news media search results amounted to $21 billion a year. Meta gathers nearly $4 billion a year from news on U.S. Facebook feeds, Martha Diaz Aszkenazy, publisher of the San Fernando Valley Sun, testified that outlets like hers will go under if the state legislature does not act.