Oregon bill would make big tech pay for local news
Monique Merrill
SALEM, Ore. (CN) — For years, big tech companies have profited from ad revenue generated from news content, and Oregon may become the first state in the country with a law handing some of that profit back to newsrooms — if lawmakers can push it through before the end of the legislative session.
Oregon State Senator Khan Pham is sponsoring SB 686, a bill that would require tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay for access to local journalism. The bill would also create the Oregon Civic Information Consortium, housed at the University of Oregon, to award grants for civic information initiatives.
“The First Amendment is the first one for a reason,” Pham said during a rules committee meeting discussing the bill at the Oregon Capitol on Wednesday. “The rights of free speech and free press are so important, but in communities across Oregon, that light of freedom of the press has been dimmed or even gone dark.”
Over the past two years, 75% of Oregon journalists have been laid off, according to Pham. Eighteen news outlets have closed in the last three years, according to a report from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication’s Agora Journalism Center, and the Oregon Employment Department projects journalism jobs will keep shrinking, losing about nine positions annually. This decline is a key driver behind SB 686.
Under the bill’s latest amendment, 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 six 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.
Payouts to digital publishers would be based on the number of journalists and freelancers they employ in Oregon. The bill was recently revised to better withstand a potential constitutional challenge, though legislative counsel noted the legal outcome is uncertain due to the novel nature of the legislation.
"I think that if we said, 'Let's wait until the dust settles and we can really be confident that we're not gonna have to go to court on this,' we probably wouldn't pass legislation of any substance or importance," Senator Jeff Golden said.
No other state has a law of this kind on the books; however, California proposed a similar bill in 2024, which failed to pass. Both Australia and Canada have passed laws requiring tech companies to compensate media companies for hosting their content and generating ad revenue.
However, with less than three weeks left in the legislative session, Oregon lawmakers expressed uncertainty that a bill of this scale could make it across the finish line.
“We're talking about a complex policy consideration with complex legal and constitutional considerations and complex user interface questions,” Senator Daniel Bonham said.
For instance, the lawmakers raised concerns that tech companies could choose to strike deals with only select news providers, creating an uneven and potentially biased news landscape. They also raised concerns about tech companies choosing to forgo working with Oregon media companies entirely.
“We have heard threats, of course, from certain platforms that they would withhold news content,” Pham said.
Pham noted that Google backed down from similar threats against Canada when it passed its Online News Act.
“Google's main product, profit making and monetization depend on providing users access to reliable news content,” Pham said. “And so we have found that in Canada at least, where this has been implemented, they are incentivized to actually provide that content.”
Still, lawmakers voiced unease over the potential fallout small newsrooms would face if big tech companies were unwilling to enter into agreements or arbitration to pay for content. Citing an op-ed from Benjamin Chavis Jr., president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Bonham amplified the concern that it could disrupt search traffic that small, minority-owner newspapers rely on.
To Pham, the bill aims to restore balance and ensure that newsrooms, regardless of size, are fairly compensated for the revenue tech companies have generated from their content.
Plus, it has substantial support from dozens of local news producers within the state. 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.
“When local news disappears, civic engagement declines, corruption increases, and polarization deepens. SB686 is a chance to reverse that trend — to invest in the infrastructure of truth, trust, and community,” the association wrote.
A similar bill was proposed at the federal level in 2022, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, 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 the 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.