The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday passed a bipartisan bill aimed at giving small and mid-sized news organizations more clout to negotiate compensation with Big Tech platforms.
The legislation still must overcome opposition in both parties and navigate an uncertain path to a full vote in the Senate.
The measure was passed after Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, struck a compromise with one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, to carve out content moderation from any media negotiations with tech giants such as Facebook and Google.
“Tech goliaths like Facebook and Google are strangling smaller conservative publications by keeping them from making a profit on online platforms,” said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who co-sponsored the bill. “The manipulation is squashing free speech. This bill bars Big Tech firms from throttling, filtering, suppressing or curating online content while providing local news outlets with a fair playing field to negotiate against these censorship giants.”
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act or JCPA would “support small, local, independent and conservative news publications that struggle to survive under the weight of Big Tech’s market dominance and censorship efforts,” according to the News/Media Alliance, a coalition of news organizations including The Washington Times that supports the measure.
“Today’s markup and vote was a major step towards getting small and local news publishers the fair compensation they deserve for their content,” said Alliance President & CEO David Chavern. He called on the House Judiciary Committee to vote on the measure next week, saying it’s likely the final chance to move the legislation before the midterm elections.
NetChoice, a tech industry group, is criticizing the measure as a tool to give more power to entrenched media organizations. The group also tweaked Mr. Cruz for joining forces with Ms. Klobuchar.
“This bill is less about protecting journalists and more about scoring political points for Senator Klobuchar, which makes it mystifying to see Sen. Cruz is helping her,” said Jennifer Huddleston, policy counsel for NetChoice. “The full Senate must reject this pro-collusion government intervention in American news and views.”
She said exempting newspapers from antitrust laws “will incentivize them to collude in order to control legitimate news and diminish competition.”
“In an effort to prop-up traditional media, Congress forgets that Americans have more sources of news and views than ever before – because of the internet,” Ms. Huddleston said. “Traditional media is increasingly woke and progressive, so we’re disappointed to see Republicans support this bill.”
Ms. Klobuchar had withdrawn the bill from consideration earlier this month after Mr. Cruz introduced an amendment to limit social media platforms’ ability to censor or moderate content. He said it would protect “against this antitrust liability being used as a shield for censorship.”