December 8, 2022
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow news organizations to bargain collectively with dominant tech firms to distribute their content, was left out of must-pass defense spending legislation on Tuesday due to pushback from the tech industry.
The move came a day after Facebook threatened to remove news from its platform if lawmakers passed the bill, a threat that publisher groups condemned. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook parent Meta, slammed the bill as ill-conceived and said the company would rather scrub news from its products than submit to government mandated-negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets.
Lots of new consumer advocacy organizations and think tanks, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, had also come out against the bill, claiming that it would force tech platforms to carry extreme or harmful content and would disproportionately benefit large media conglomerates. NetChoice and the Computer Communications Industry Association also launched separate ad campaigns criticizing the bill.
Their efforts appear to have been fruitful, as the bill was removed from Congress’ defense spending bill for 2023 after being approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
The sources for this piece include an article in BusinessInsider.
