The past decade and a half have not been kind to the news industry. The near-total capture of advertising revenue by Big Tech has devastated newsrooms around the world, forcing some papers to close and others to cut reporting teams to the bone.
As always, there are tough, daring and determined reporters doing their best to expose the stories powerful people don’t want us to know about. But they do so in an ever-more-difficult and financially precarious environment.
However, a threat has now emerged that threatens the survival of the news as it has existed for hundreds of years. And while the general source of that threat may not be novel (spoiler: it’s American Big Tech again), the specific tool is new and insidious: Google’s AI Overviews (AIO).
When you ask Google a question now, the familiar list of blue links is often shoved out of sight and replaced with an autogenerated summary – the AIO.
Stealing
In news-related searches, AIO are based on reporting scraped from news pages written by human journalists. To be crystal clear: Google is effectively stealing the reporting done by professional reporters without paying them for it, nor the news publishers they work for.
Crucially, AIO also shoves the links to the source articles from publishers down “below the fold” on the search results page, meaning that, in many cases, they simply won’t be clicked through to at all.
If users don’t click through to the news websites that were scraped to create the AIO, that means Google hasn’t just nicked the stories; it has also stolen the advertising revenue that helped pay for the reporters who wrote them.
Lose-lose situation
That leaves news publishers with a lose-lose situation: either allow their work to be taken for no fee and probably eventually go out of business, or opt out of AIO.
But opting out of AIO also means opting out of Google’s search indexing. And given Google’s 90% share of the global search market, that is broadly equivalent to removing themselves from the internet entirely – and probably eventually going out of business.
It’s a desperate situation. But the fightback is under way – and South Africa is leading the charge, via a pioneering, world-first antitrust action.
South Africa’s Competition Commission has issued the most impressive response to this problem of any competition regulator in the world so far.
In its provisional report setting out its response, the Competition Commission would order Google to allow news publishers to opt out of having their work stolen, but crucially also allow them to remain on Search, so they don’t disappear from the web.
Condescension
The action by Competition Commission is strong, serious and world-leading – while Google’s response smacks of neo-colonial condescension. It says the Competition Commission’s plan would “break” AIO, which has been “helping people in South Africa more easily learn about complex topics”.
We would suggest that if Google is so interested in helping South Africans understand “complex topics”, then perhaps it should stop stealing the work of South African journalists already doing exactly that.
Instead, the tech giant has chosen to enter into a cynical embrace of Donald Trump in a naked attempt to gain presidential protection from exactly this kind of action by lawmakers outside the US.
That’s why it has to be defended. My organisation, Foxglove, is calling on governments, lawmakers, journalists and anybody who cares about the value of good information around the world to speak up for the Competition Commission and to defend it against the attacks it will soon face from some of the world’s most powerful people.
Read more: Competition Commission inquiry — SA media companies welcome smackdown for Big Tech
International fightback
Establishing partnerships with other regulators around the world that are taking on this fight, including Australia, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada, is a crucial next step.
International partnerships enable joint regulatory investigations into how AIO is hitting news organisations across the globe; prevents any one regulator from being scapegoated by Google; and, through collective action, gives regulators the bargaining power to force Google to accept meaningful changes to its operations.
Read more: We’re not the ATM: Google says no to Competition Commission’s R500m proposal to fund SA news
One final point: while Google AIO has the potential to put all non-government press out of business, it is unlikely to wipe them out at the same speed. The biggest publishers may try to cut deals to avoid the worst impacts in the medium term.
But small, new, independent and specialist newspapers – often the ones who tell the most important and under-reported stories – won’t have the power to make those kinds of deals, even if they wanted to. So they will die first.
If we want a world where access to information is not dependent on the benevolence of our rulers, nor the agendas of the owners of the most powerful media companies – or Google’s auto-generated slop – then we’re going to have to fight for it.
And South Africa is showing the world where to begin. DM