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The inaugural edition of e4m ‘DNPA Dialogues’ brought together global leaders to delve deeper into the platform-publisher relationship, especially in the age of rapid digitisation.
One of the sessions at the event was a dialogue between panellists Emma McDonald, senior policy adviser, Minderoo Foundation and Peter Lewis, director, The Australia Institute.
McDonald has over 25 years of experience working as general council at policy, regulatory and public affairs. She served as the senior policy adviser for the Australian minister for communications. Lewis is one of Australia’s leading public campaigners with more than two decades of experience in media, politics and communications. The session was chaired by Tanmay Maheshwari, chairperson, DNPA and Pawan Agarwal, deputy managing director, DB Corp Ltd.
The session commenced with McDonald talking about the Australian government's decision to move to the big tech platforms. She said, “I think governments for about the past 10 years or more in Australia were aware of the digital disruption that the platforms had caused the media industry and I had come from a media company so I had seen it first hand. The government in Australia have been tackling this problem for some time. They had tried to deal with it through various programmes and funding schemes over the time and they had written a lot of papers about the solution.
"There was an initial phase of the voluntary code proposed and I think everyone was optimistic that Google and Facebook would come to the table and work with media companies. In April 2020, after the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, when I was working in the minister’s office, a lot of publishers were coming to us and were very concerned about what their future would be and how could we help them.”
McDonald also emphasised that media companies should put up a united front and support legistation for it to come to fruition. "When all the media companies
come together, it leads to the legislation being introduced. It is really important the governments hold their nerve when it gets really pointy in negotiating the final stages of legislation."
While it may not absolutely perfect, if the legislation delivers the outcome, then all is not in vain, said McDonald. "It has been done very well in support of journalism," she emphasised.
Lewis further elucidated that when people bring up digital platforms like Facebook and Google, they aren't talking about tech companies but about advertising monopolies. “The finding on the advertising monopoly was the trigger for our competition regulator to pass a series of recommendations. I think they made 27 recommendations of which the news media bargaining code was just one. But if it had just been a policy sitting with a minister’s office, there was organised opposition from both Google and Facebook who have got teams of government relations people exerting whatever pressure they can.
"They were not going to give up this principle loudly because the proposition was to regulate at a national level. The way the platforms operate which is just something they have never really done before. They push back at everything”, he added.
Concluding the session, Lewis conveyed, “My belief is that the platforms paid a premium to Australian media companies to close the thing down and I think they hoped that the rest of the world won’t be listening.”