Antitrust

What To Do When Free Speech No Longer Pays The Bills?

Antitrust and Constitutional law scholars, you're up!

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Speech bubble with ellipsis icon vector sign and symbol isolated on white background, Speech bubble with ellipsis logo conceptThe First Amendment does more than let you pressure students into praying with you in public a la Bremerton. It also protects the right to free speech and the free press. You know what else is fundamental? Paying rent, eating food and saving enough money to afford Bayonetta 3 once it drops. And if folks interested in covering the news don’t want to end up on the highway with a “Will Report For Food” sign, they might want to pay a little bit of attention to antitrust.

 Google and Facebook, which currently control the bulk of digital advertising and have become the main source of news for many Americans. A huge number of search results on Google link to news stories, reproducing enough content for users to consume. But 65% of these users do not click through to the news publishers’ websites. This means that even when their work has delivered value to the public, the businesses actually investing in and doing the work of journalism can’t earn sufficient advertising revenue to cover their costs. Needless to say, this is not economically sustainable.

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That is exactly what the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, currently in Congress, would do. It would authorize news outlets to create “joint negotiating entities” to bargain for compensation from internet platforms for the news stories they use…The bill also creates a carve-out from federal antitrust law, the statutory framework that regulates economic competition and coordination.

The innovation associated with free markets only really comes about if the markets are actually free. Monopolies tend to chill innovation — what’s the point in investing in the R&D required for the new breakthrough if your customer base stays the same? This doesn’t just apply to widgets, it goes for news sources too. If a Google or a Facebook ultimately comes to control the mechanisms that determine how the average person sees the news, how will people find out if (read: when) something goes wrong at one of the companies? Take Amazon for example. They’ve already been mired in antitrust litigation that accused them of rigging search results to push their own products above other suppliers. If Google has free reign to control which stories get viewed, do you think they wouldn’t suppress other outlets trying to break through the search results? With the amount of Scout’s Honors I’ve seen the Supreme Court call on and do away with, I personally would like to see some actionable checks and balances when it comes to maintaining free speech.

What should the future of free speech look like? How should it be protected from corporate interests? Is antitrust the answer? Let us know at tips@abovethelaw.com.

A New Law Can Help Us Keep The Robust Free Press Our Democracy Needs [LA Times]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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