Lawmakers recently introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would allow newspapers and local news broadcasters to collectively bargain with platforms such as Google, Meta, and Amazon to increase compensation for their products. In a new insight, Technology and Innovation Policy Analyst Joshua Levine explains what this legislation would do and why it would fail to protect journalism outlets.

Key points:

• The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow certain newspapers and local news broadcasters to join together and collectively negotiate distribution terms with “online content distributors.”
• The bill would essentially provide a carveout to allow certain publications and broadcasters to engage in price fixing, an anticompetitive practice that would otherwise violate antitrust laws; the bill would also threaten established laws and practices related to content moderation and copyright protection online.
• Previous attempts to provide antitrust exemptions for individual industries, including journalism, have failed to induce greater competition or higher-quality goods and services in the past, and there is little reason to believe this attempt would be different.

Read the analysis