Google and facebook do no evil to media

Google and facebook do no evil to media

Rework data ownership, transparency and audit.

As the demand for regulation, if not break-up, of Big Tech grows louder in the West, Google and Facebook would do well to voluntarily submit themselves to greater scrutiny and audit, and be fair about sharing the revenue generated by providing access to content with the generators of the content. True, content generators gain from Google’s search and Facebook’s sharing functions used by billions of people around the world. These facilitate audience access. But there would be nothing to access if there were no content generated in the first place. It is obvious that content generators should gain from audiences that access their content. However, because Google controls not just search but the advertising technologies that serve up ads and measure their conversion and attribution (see the story in this paper by Venkat Ananth and Shelley Singh and does not make data available to others to assess the veracity of its estimates, there is considerable bias in favour of Google.

Google and Facebook are estimated to corner 68% of India’s digital advertising revenue. This threatens the commercial viability of traditional news organisations, whose print revenues are under threat from migration of readers to digital versions, apart from cyclical slowdown in advertising. If these organisations do not receive much revenues from their digital audiences, because the bulk of the monetisation of access to their content is done by Google and Facebook, their ability to generate content that makes them eligible to be called the fourth estate of democracy would shrink. The EU, which leads the world in digital regulation, is actively contemplating rules that would force Google and Facebook to share the revenues they generate from content with the content generators. It would make sense for India to follow suit.

Ownership of data is implicated as well. If a consumer shows interest in a particular product on a news site, who owns that data? The way advertising technology works at present, Big Tech monopolises that data. Data regulation should change that.