Regulation is the only way to rein in rich and powerful digital platforms

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When talking about the complexities of news, or how information is distributed in the 21st century, the word “bully” might seem out of place. But as Facebook threatens to cut off access to sharing news in response to a proposed Australian law, it’s hard not to think that bullying might be exactly what is going on.

Here’s the (slightly complicated) situation: in April of this year, after an 18-month inquiry into the role of digital platforms, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was asked by the government there to develop a code to address the imbalance in power between digital platform businesses such as Facebook and news organizations.

In July, the ACCC announced that its solution was to enforce a set of rules in which Facebook and Google would have to negotiate prices to have news pieces from vetted news organizations shared on their platforms. If they cannot, a panel will arbitrate a final, binding price. Finally, Facebook or Google would have to inform news companies of any changes to their algorithms that would negatively impact the news business. In response, Facebook threatened to simply ban the sharing of news links on its platform in the country. Hence the justified use of the term bully.

There is legitimate debate over whether Australia’s approach is the right one. But the fact that Facebook can threaten to simply stop distributing news when a significant portion of the population gets its news from its platform highlights the problem: Facebook and Google simply have too much power over the distribution of news and need to be reined in.

What Facebook and Google did to news is now a well-worn story. Because they became so dominant in the attention they command in our lives, digital platforms became the distribution centres for information online. In doing so, ad spending shifted billions of dollars from print and news organizations over to the more efficient, targeted ads that tech giants produce because they have so much data on users. That change, coupled with the decimation of classified ads by Craigslist and Kijiji et al, meant that news organizations’ share of revenue plummeted just at the time that millions more were reading things online.

That’s not to say the news business is somehow free of blame. Not only was the broad reaction to the effects of the web and mobile devices excruciatingly slow, it was also full of misstarts and poorly thought out schemes.

But if that story is familiar, what is sometimes less talked about is how Facebook in particular flattened discourse such that legitimate news organizations were often overtaken or overshadowed by those of a much lower quality. As The New York Times’ Kevin Roose points out almost daily, what is most shared on Facebook tends to be hard right, inflammatory posts that often distort truth if not outright lie.

The economic framework of news thus has a real social impact. In acquiring such enormous economic power, digital platforms undercut news organizations’ ability to create profitable business models. In turn, not only is the existence of news organizations threatened, the vacuum left would be easily filled by charlatans and bad actors. The sheer power and size of the digital platforms has become a problem all its own.

Australia’s lesson for Canada’s news industry, however, may in fact be a study in what it means to tackle power. Regulation is a tricky beast; for example, if one were to legally insist on human content moderation, only companies the size of Google or Facebook might have the resources to have a chance of enacting such policy, thus entrenching their dominant positions by cutting off smaller companies. There is a risk, too, that Australia’s approach threatens to do something similar by simply doubling down on the privacy-invading data model of Facebook and Google and then asking for a slice of that poisonous pie.

Canada’s response to the inarguably excessive power of Facebook and Google has to thus be in prioritizing truth-seeking, fact-checked, vetted news, while also challenging the dominance of Facebook and Google’s business models themselves. How that happens will likely be in finding a way to fund both local and national news organizations without directly tying that funding to either Facebook and Google’s distribution, or the whims of changing government ideology.

But that we are talking about government intervention at all outlines the stakes of the problem. Facebook, Google, and other digital platforms have become so powerful and rich that regulation is the only way to rein them in. How we go about that is something we will have to decide soon. But the thing with bullies is that they don’t give up power on their own — it has to be taken back, and sometimes, the only option is to use force.

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Navneet Alang is a Toronto-based freelance contributing technology columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @navalang





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