India and other countries should pass legislation with enabling mechanisms to bring Big Tech companies and news, media, and content publishers together to work out commercial deals, Paul Fletcher, a member of the Australian House of Representatives and its former communications minister, said.

The Australian government was one of the first large governments that passed a law requiring Big Tech companies such as Meta and Google to work out fair deals with news, media and publishing houses for the content shared on their platforms.

“The mechanism we came up with was designed to encourage commercial deals and get Facebook (now Meta Inc) and Google to the table to negotiate commercially with news media businesses. We wanted to intervene only as much as was needed and no more,” Fletcher told ET.

The code, Fletcher said, had “careful incentives” to encourage Big Tech companies such as Meta and Google to sign commercial deals with news, media, and publishing houses.

Both these companies inked other deals with publishers across the world after the Australian law was enacted, he added.

Another aspect of bringing Big Tech companies to the negotiating table was to treat it as a competition issue rather than a copyright issue, he said.

The issue was a competition problem because “Google and Facebook, which were very successful in attracting eyeballs and monetising through selling digital advertising” were competing with news, media and publishing houses which were equally in the advertising business, both in the digital and traditional markets, Fletcher said. Big Tech companies were also attracting these people to their platform by using the content “generated and paid for by news media businesses,” but not sharing the revenue generated by it, he said.

“And because of their market power, the competition regulator reached a conclusion that the deals, which would ordinarily have been done on commercial terms, were not being done,” Fletcher said.

In 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) submitted a 623-page report to the Australian government focusing on the “impact of digital platforms on the choice and quality of news and journalism”.

In its report, the ACCC also concluded that the “imbalance in the regulatory treatment of content delivered via traditional broadcasting”, compared to digital platforms such as Facebook and Google, were “distortionary” and should be addressed by the government.

So far, the Indian government has not passed any law requiring Big Tech companies to pay news, media and publishing houses for the content shared on the platforms of the social media intermediaries.

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