The code means Facebook and Google will be required to agree to a price and a penalty of up to $10million if they break the rules. Mr Lewkovitz said “historically creating news cost a lot of money, took a lot of people and a lot of resources”.
However, as online news has grown in popularity, “we’ve seen what are effectively parasitic curated sources of news which would cherry pick news from existing online sources,” he said. As advertising shifted online a situation emerged where “big tech companies can actually control what people are seeing,” Mr Lewkovitz said. “It’s very easy if you control the media to essentially control people’s thoughts”.