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Microsoft is putting all its weight behind a European effort to force big tech companies to pay for the right to link to news articles. Google and Facebook have strongly opposed such proposals in Europe and Australia, describing them as an attack on the open web. Microsoft does not agree.
“Access to new, broad and in-depth media coverage is essential to the success of our democracies,” Microsoft Vice President Casper Klynge said in a press release.
More specifically, Microsoft supports calls for Europe to adopt a mandatory arbitration rule like the one currently under consideration in Australia. Such a rule would increase the influence of news publishers by giving them a way to force tech giants to the negotiating table.
Klynge touted Microsoft’s past financial support for journalism and described an Australian-style arbitration mechanism as “a logical next step.”
An offer Google can’t refuse
Pressure on Google to pay for news articles intensified in 2019 when the European Parliament passed copyright law giving news agencies a ‘neighboring right’ over the use of excerpts from their articles. articles. European laws like this must be translated into the local law of each EU country. France was one of the first countries to do so.
In the past, Google has responded to laws like this by simply removing a country’s news articles from its search results. But this time, the French competition authorities warned Google that this would be considered unfair discrimination and therefore a violation of competition law.
As a result, Google had no choice but to pay license fees to news agencies. In Google’s first deal under the new framework, the search giant pledged $ 76 million over three years to 121 different news agencies.
However, some French news organizations have criticized this agreement by letting Google fend for itself too easily. And now some are calling for an even stronger legal mechanism to force Google – and possibly other tech giants – to sit on the table.
In Australia, officials are considering a baseball-style arbitration process in which each party makes an offer and then a neutral arbitrator decides which offer is the most reasonable. The arrangement is widely seen as more favorable to news outlets, as it prompts tech giants not to delay negotiations or insist on low license rates.
“Fair and balanced agreements”
In their new blog post, Microsoft and several European press groups are calling on European decision-makers to “take inspiration from new Australian legislation which requires custodians of technology covered by this law to share their income with news agencies”. They say the law “should impose payments for the use of content from news publishers by these gatekeepers and should include arbitration provisions, to ensure that fair deals are negotiated.”
“Even though news publishers have a neighboring right, they may not have the economic strength to negotiate fair and balanced deals with these tech-savvy companies,” say Microsoft and the publishers. Without protections, the guardians of the technology “might otherwise threaten to withdraw from trading or exit markets altogether.”
You might expect Microsoft to stand alongside Google in a fight pitting America’s tech giants against European politicians and publishers. But Google and Microsoft are in very different positions in the search market. Google has more than 90% of the search market share in Australia and a number of European countries, while Microsoft’s Bing is mired in single numbers. The “link tax” proposals will therefore cost Google much more than Microsoft.
Partnering with European decision-makers could help Microsoft build goodwill there. Meanwhile, if Google actually does invoke the nuclear option and shut down its search engine in Australia or elsewhere, it could mean big market share gains for Bing. So fueling the conflict between its biggest research rival and foreign governments may have far more benefits than harm for Microsoft.
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