It’s time for Big Tech to pay journalists for the journalism that they produce.

The news for Google has been merciless the last couple of months. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer monopolist.

On Monday, Aug. 5, Judge Amit P. Mehta sided with the U.S. Justice Department and ruled that Google unfairly used its market dominance to stifle competition in internet search, violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Mehta wrote in his decision, “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

The penalty is still to come, and whether that will include massive fines or selling off parts of its business, the reverberations will be far reaching. “This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “No company – no matter how large or influential – is above the law.”

In April, as the California State Legislature was taking up Assembly Bill 886, known as the California Journalism Preservation Act, Google preemptively blocked access to some California news webpages to try to intimidate both the media and the duly elected representatives. It didn’t work so well for them then, either.

“We cannot look away from these challenges.”

Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, says, “A thriving and robust press is core to the health of American democracy. Local journalists share factual information, keeping us informed. Harmful tactics by Big Tech to intimidate and threaten California’s media outlets is plain wrong. We cannot look away from these challenges to our democratic values.”

Speaking during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in June, State Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Merced, said, “I support this bill and will vote for it. I love the news… news makes you think.”

Caballero chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which will hear AB 886 next, despite lobbying efforts by the tech industry to squash it.

The landscape in journalism in 2024 is one we’ve never witnessed before. The demand for accurate, trustworthy, local information has never been greater, and the economic infrastructure that supports the industry has never been more fragile. Readers in Monterey County who we serve rely on the journalism that originates from skilled reporters and editors in this building. Many of the readers, however, access that copyrighted content via Facebook and Google, and the advertising revenue generated by our content on those platforms does not get passed back to the newspaper. AB 886 would ensure news publications in California are fairly and directly compensated by Big Tech companies for the journalism they produce.

As news consumption has moved online, Google and Facebook have become the de facto gatekeepers of journalism. It’s time for big tech to pay market value for the content they siphon from local news publishers. Doing so will help preserve vital local journalism.

Anya Schiffrin and Haaris Mateen, professors at Columbia and the University of Houston, respectively, published the results of a working paper they co-wrote with three economists to estimate the value that news content contributes to revenues at Meta and Google. They say the number is $11.9-$13.9 billion per year. “Unsurprisingly, by keeping the cost of goods sold (news) down, Google and Meta have grown rich off the advertising revenue they reap from attracting the world’s eyeballs to their sites,” they wrote. California’s share of that pie is over $1.5 billion per year.

The CJPA would require Big Tech platforms to directly compensate publishers based on the number of journalists in their newsrooms, not the amount of web traffic. The bill would not involve the state distributing a single dollar of tax money. It requires that operations with more than five journalists (or freelance equivalents) spend 70 percent of the money on journalists – it would increase the number of reporters in California communities.

The coming weeks might be the perfect time for Google to do some reputation management. But judging by the ad campaign that Google and its compatriots in the Computer & Communications Industry Association launched this past week attacking AB 886, it may take the California Legislature to get the monopolist from Mountain View to live up to its original credo: Don’t be evil.

ERIK CUSHMAN is the Weekly’s publisher. Reach him at erik@montereycountynow.com