For Aatmanirbhar News + Mandate Tech Giants To Share Revenue

Context: Tech giants enjoy the biggest share in the pie of revenue generated by the digital news business.

Need for mandating tech giants to share revenue

• Additional tax revenue: Indian companies make additional profits and pay additional taxes. 
• To create a financially healthy news media: which is essential for democracy to function.
  • It will also make India’s news media self-reliant while a financially weak digital media is prone to manipulation.
• To eliminate the unfair practice in the digital news business: Foreign-owned tech giants who don’t spend a paisa generating digital content are making the most profit out of the content.
  • Tech giants like Google and Facebook (FB) take away most of the revenue generated from digitally available news content and are trying to cut unfair deals with smaller content publishers.
• International efforts: In countries like France, Australia, Brazil etc., there are efforts from tech giants like Google and FB for sharing revenues like:
  • Paying for high quality content.
  • Google’s revenue-from-news business model.

Actions taken by government to regulate tech giants

• Imposition of the equalization levy.
• Compelled them to take actions: e.g. Critiqued and demanded action from FB-owned WhatsApp over messages that have fomented law and order incidents.
• Created several hurdles for them: e.g. WhatsApp was made to go through several hoops before its payments service got clearance for limited pilot use.
• Insisted them to change their business models: e.g. Amazon and Flipkart were asked to change their business models to better align with India’s rules on online marketplaces.

Way forward: For revenue sharing between tech giants and the news industry.

• Sign copyright agreement with tech giants: e.g. Google signed copyright agreements with six French newspapers and magazines, including biggies Le Monde and Le Figaro. 
• In the United States, there’s growing support for a law that allows collective bargaining by the news industry to make tech giants pay for news content.