Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation that seeks to aid struggling news publishers by allowing them to negotiate collectively against the tech companies over revenue sharing and other deals.
Google, which declined comment on the proposal, launched a website https://blog.google/supportingnews#overview on Thursday asserting it is"one of the world's biggest financial supporters of journalism" by virtue of the ad revenue and content licensing fees it provides to media. Google said its search engine sends readers to publishers' websites 24 billion times per month.
Carl Szabo of NetChoice said his goal was to kill the bill or at least convince lawmakers to amend it so that it would be restricted to smaller publications, excluding outlets such as the Washington Post or New York Times.