Oregon bill intended to make Big Tech pay for local news hits roadblock
Monique Merrill
SALEM, Ore. (CN) — With less than a week remaining in Oregon’s legislative session, an ambitious bill set to force tech behemoths to pay local newsrooms failed to advance from the Senate floor, but its supporters haven’t backed down.
SB 686 would require tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay for access to local journalism and create a consortium to award grants for civic information initiatives with part of the revenue.
To Oregon State Senator Khan Pham, the bill’s sponsor, the legislation is a vital lifeline for local newsrooms that have struggled to remain open.
“The status quo is that mega platforms are luring users with current events, content and monetizing that product without permission and without compensation,” Pham said during the bill’s third reading in the Senate on Tuesday. “This isn’t about a handout. This is about correcting a theft of value and correcting a market that has been, according to the FTC, illegally monetized.”
Pham explained that the Oregon bill combines components from similar bills proposed in California and New Jersey — neither of which has been enacted, although California struck a deal with Google to jointly contribute millions to support local newsrooms. Under SB 686, tech companies would have three options: strike payment deals with digital publishers, enter arbitration to settle collectively or pay a lump sum into a fund for distribution to journalism providers.
If platforms opt to pay a lump sum, those with more than 6 billion monthly active users (like Google) must contribute at least $104 million annually, while those with fewer (like Meta) must pay $18 million. Ten percent of these funds would go to the Oregon Civic Information Consortium, which would be housed at the University of Oregon.
On the Oregon Senate floor, the bill faced significant opposition from lawmakers who were skeptical that the intended benefits would come to fruition.
“Does anybody honestly believe these companies are just going to write the check and keep doing business as usual here?” Oregon State Senator Mark Meek asked. “No. They will stop sharing news content in Oregon altogether, just like they did in Canada.”
Canada implemented a similar bill, the Online News Act, in 2023. Meek referred to an article from the CBC last August that outlined the challenges newsrooms faced after Meta announced it would block Canadian news rather than pay for news.
“ We say we want to support local journalism, and I myself subscribe to many in my local community, but this bill would do the opposite,” Meek said.
Other lawmakers questioned what would happen to Oregon newsrooms if Meta or any other platform refused to pay for all publishers and only picked and chose ones that align with a certain slant.
Pham explained that choosing to do so would open a platform up to liability unless they chose one of the three payment options outlined in the bill.
“This bill doesn’t pick winners or losers or favorites — it establishes fair rules of the road so Oregon journalism can survive and thrive regardless of the size, market share or viewpoint,” Pham said.
The yearly lump sum option, Pham explained, would charge Google a mere fraction of the revenue it generates in a day.
Then there are the legal questions, with some senators concerned that the bill will face immediate and costly challenges in court if it is enacted. However, legislators also called for support.
“No one could stand on this floor and say, ‘Here's how that's gonna work out’ with absolute confidence. We don't absolutely know,” state Senator Jeff Golden said. “What we do know is that struggling news outlets in this state, in a great majority, support this bill.”
An op-ed from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association — and signed by 39 news publishers — lauded the bill as a “bold and necessary first step towards a solution” to what it called a fundamentally unfair revenue model.
Yet, the words of support were not enough to sway a majority vote, and the bill failed by a single vote to pass the Senate. It was referred to a rules meeting for additional work — the third time it’s been referred there since it was introduced in January — but the work session had yet to be scheduled as of Tuesday night.
At the federal level, lawmakers proposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act in 2022, but a vote was never taken. That bill would have created a process through which news providers could collectively negotiate with online platforms regarding the use of their news content.
A study from the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University estimated that Facebook and Google Search would owe news publishers between $11.9 billion to $13.9 billion each year, had the legislation been enacted.