How Will Elon Feel When He Realizes Congress Is Trying To Force Him To Throw Free Money At Newspapers He Hates?
We've written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for... sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. Supporters insist it's not a link tax nor a change to copyright law, but it is both. The fundamental argument in the bill is that large sites that link to news organizations need to pay for a license for access." But access to what? There's no license for access for content put on the web for free. It's just... the web.
The bill also has a bunch of nasty features. The main mechanism by which it works is that it allows news organizations" to join together to negotiate" for such a license. The collective bargaining part isn't such a big deal, other than the fact that it's collective bargaining over something that is inherently free: the right to link and send traffic to a website. But, as part of the bill, sites that can't reach a negotiated agreement to pay up have to go to baseball-style arbitration, where each side submits a number and the arbitrator chooses which one wins. So sites can't just say we're not paying." They may be forced to.
Furthermore, this will allow today's worst disinformation providers to demand free cash from tech companies and, because the bill forbids any sort of retaliation," it effectively allows the worst propagandists to force sites like Google and Facebook to carry and promote their links, because anything else will be seen as retaliation. So the bill will help give free money to nonsense peddlers.
And, contrary to the claims of supporters of the bill, it won't help journalism either. Most of the money will go to large private equity firms that have been buying up regional newspapers, firing most of the employees, setting up a barebones staff, and taking in the pretty significant regular cash flow from long time subscribers who just continue subscribing via inertia. Do we really think those private equity folks are going to take this money and invest in better journalism, or just pocket it?
Anyway, as we noted yesterday, reports are that some Congressional leaders (namely Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell) have cut a deal to include the JCPA in the must-pass NDAA, despite this bill having literally nothing to do with national defense (the purported purpose of the NDAA).
Lots of organizations have put out statements and/or action tools to protest this. Public Knowledge released a big group letter. Fight for the Future has a tool to contact Congress about this. Chamber of Progress has a really nice tool for sending a letter to Congress as well, while also highlighting how the law would help fund nonsense peddlers. CCIA also has some TV ads explaining the problems with the bill.
It's unclear how the companies would react. While the bill does effectively say that sites cannot punish websites for demanding payment, it does seem like sites could just stop linking to news. And Meta/Facebook is already threatening to do just that:
If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation," Meta said in a statement tweeted by spokesman Andy Stone, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions."
This is not an idle threat. When similar legislation passed in Australia, the company blocked links to news stories for a few days, until the Australian government made some concessions in the law. While many argued that this step backfired for Facebook, I still don't understand how. The company was only responding to the incentives placed before it. Of course, I'm not sure if Google could or would follow suit and block links to news sites, because that would be a huge mess for the entire internet.
And then there's the question of Twitter. Technically, it does not seem that Twitter currently meets the requirements to be subject to the law, but as with so many of these laws, they base the requirements on statistics that are not entirely easy to determine. But, given Musk's claims that he plans to have a billion users by 2024, that would trigger the law - meaning that Elon would then be forced to start paying news organizations.
That seems particularly interesting given Musk's pretty vocal hatred for mainstream news organizations and his stated belief that users on Twitter can effectively replace them. Yet, under this law, should it pass, Musk would be forced to first negotiate with those media organizations and then pay them for merely sending traffic to them.
Of course, if Musk had a functioning policy and communications department he might be paying attention to all this and could speak out, like Meta did. Instead, he's mostly fired them all and is focused on promoting culture war nonsense.