The European Court of Justice has ruled that tech giants must provide fair compensation to publishers, but the shift toward AI threatens to render this legal win obsolete.
For years, the relationship between Big Tech and the news industry has been practically parasitic.. Platforms like Meta, Microsoft and Google slurped up journalistic content and news snippets to bait people into endlessly scrolling — for free.. In a victory for publishers and a reality check for Silicon Valley, a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice confirmed earlier this week that publishers can request Big Tech companies to pay “fair compensation” for using
snippets of their news articles.. The headline is straightforward: platforms that use press publications online can be required to negotiate fair compensation with publishers, share the data needed to calculate it, and face regulatory intervention if they stall.. This is good, don’t get me wrong – Italy’s framework for enforcing these obligations includes 30-day negotiation windows, and fines of up to one percent of turnover for withholding data.. It has real teeth, plus a non-retaliation
clause that forbids platforms from simply pulling out of a market (like Meta did in Canada and Australia and Google did in Spain).. But at the same time, it’s a victory for a bygone era.. The legal case concerns a dispute between Facebook owner Meta and the Italian telecom watchdog AGCOM.. The AGCOM framework was designed in 2022 and adopted in January 2023.. It is built around the logic of search snippets and social media
feeds – how press content drives advertising revenue on platforms.. It says nothing about the use of journalism to train foundation models, power AI assistants, or feed retrieval-augmented generation systems.. There’s also the question of who actually benefits.. The AGCOM criteria – online audience, number of journalists, years of activity, infrastructure investment – structurally favour large, established publishers.. A broadsheet with a century of masthead history and hundreds of journalists will score high across the
board and might see some real revenue.. A regional digital outlet with a small team and limited traffic, doing essential accountability journalism, will not.. The ruling gives the rest of the EU a validated template for enforcing publishers’ ‘neighbouring rights’ – the use of parts of articles in other places than the publication itself – and it constrains the kind of ‘delay-and-litigate’ strategy platforms have deployed everywhere.. But – and sorry for being a sourpuss
– as traffic from search engines and platforms falls off a cliff in favour of AI summaries (which, despite using the journalistic content, don’t encourage going to the publisher to read it), the ruling is pretty much outdated before it will meaningfully be applied in practice.
Big Tech, news publishers, European Court of Justice, media regulation, digital economy, AI, copyright