(RoyalPatriot.com )- Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, has signed on to a call put forth by major conservative media organizations to back bipartisan legislation that will roll back the power that Big Tech has gained in recent years.
The legislation in question is called the JCPA, or the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. It’s designed to bring social media and search platforms like Facebook and Google to the bargaining table so they can pay for original news content that they current just scrape off third-party sites.
Right now, these companies make massive profits in doing so, and they don’t share any of the revenue with the creators of the actual content.
The JCPA proposes that the Big Tech companies have to pay the publishes for the content they aggregate and publish on their platforms. Just about every major conservative online media outlet has backed the bill, including Salem Media, Townhall, Washington Times, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner and Newsmax.
The JCPA looks like it will be included in the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act that is currently pending. That is happening after three major political leaders in Washington — McConnell along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — came to an agreement.
The Big Tech companies that would be affected by this legislation have struck back hard in attempt to scare media organizations away. Meta, which owns Facebook, threatened that they would ban all news content from feeds if the JCPA passes.
The new legislation would allow any publisher that has 1,500 employees of less to collectively bargain for what they consider to be fair compensation for the original content that they produce. It would be done through what’s called a four-year antitrust “safe harbor.”
Many advocates of the bill have argued that it would provide conservative media outlets especially with the best opportunity to try to fight against the huge amount of power Big Tech companies are currently able to exert over smaller publishers. That’s because it would allow the publishers to negotiate fair prices with the Big Tech companies so their content could be used on their platforms.
Many conservative publishers wrote a letter to lawmakers in Washington urging them to pass the JCPA, saying it’s “critically important to protecting the future of high-quality journalism.”
The letter continues:
“Existing laws make it difficult for news organizations to obtain fair compensation from tech platforms for the use of their content.”
It’s not just conservative media organizations that would benefit, though. In fact, all small- to mid-sized publishers could potentially benefit financially from the new legislation — no matter which way they lean politically.
Right now, these smaller publishers don’t stand a chance against Big Tech giants such as Facebook and Google, both of whom currently basically steal the content from the publishers and then make money off it — without paying the publishers for all the work they did to produce the content in the first place.
