The bill stalled in committee two weeks ago after an amendment introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz to prohibit censorship “collusion” narrowly passed, sharply dividing the bipartisan sponsors of the bill.
At the time, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., lead co-sponsor of the bill, said the bipartisan legislation had been “blown up” by the, which would provide Big Tech a negotiating out by simply bringing up content moderation. But she worked with Cruz to come up with a revised amendment to keep censorship off the table when media and Big Tech negotiate content fees.
Introduced in the House and the Senate last year, the bill provides temporary safe harbor from antitrust laws, enabling news outlets to join together to negotiate content fees for aggregated content on Google and Meta/Facebook, the only two platforms targeted by the proposed legislation. “This legislation misunderstands the relationship between Facebook and news, and it ignores our users’ preferences for new types of content,” a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed statement Thursday. “Facebook does not proactively post news on our platform — publishers and broadcasters are the ones who control whether and how their content appears on Facebook, and they can choose to use our free services as long as it provides value and makes business sense for them.
Under the bill, the annual fee paid by Big Tech would be distributed to all local publishers that participate in the collective negotiations, with 65% of the allocation based on how much they spend on journalists as a proportion of their overall budget.
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