PINF's Campaign and Communications Manager Beckie Shuker explains the latest developments in platform-publisher bargaining and the troubling consequences for local news.
In January 2025, PINF published groundbreaking research showing that Google owes £2.2 billion to UK news publishers. Our report coincided with a new law empowering the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to start regulating Google’s influence over UK news markets.
This should have marked the dawn of a new era in platform-publisher relations. News publishers – including local and independent news providers – should have become able to negotiate with big tech firms for a fair share of the huge revenues that they derive from news content. This would have helped to regenerate local news providers and the communities they serve across the UK.
However, the CMA has now decided that it won’t move forward with substantive regulation of platform-publisher relations for another year. This setback has huge consequences for local news.
What’s happened so far?
PINF’s 2025 study, conducted by FehrAdvice, investigated the true value of news to Google. The groundbreaking experiment showed that Google generates £5.6 billion a year with the help of news media content. The big tech firm needs news to provide the trustworthy information that keeps users returning to its search engine.
New legislation in the UK should be helping news outlets to claim their fair share of the profit generated by news content. The Digital Markets, Consumer and Competition Act was designed to address the imbalance of power between platforms and publishers.
The Act introduced a new bargaining framework that will allow publishers to negotiate with big tech, and PINF’s advocacy ensured that independent local news outlets would be able to join forces and bargain collectively. It gave the CMA the power to designate firms with Strategic Market Status, making them subject to Conduct Requirements that will govern negotiations.
Since we published our research, Google has been designated with Strategic Market Status by the CMA. It’s great to see the Competition and Markets Authority start to bring the framework to life. However, progress has been painfully slow, at a time when tech companies are quickly accelerating change. New products like Google’s AI overviews are making struggling media business models even less sustainable.
What’s happening now?
Last week, the CMA published the first set of Conduct Requirements that will form the basis of publishers’ negotiations with Google. The CMA’s investigation found that publishers can’t withdraw their content from use in Google’s AI overviews without also being de-ranked in Google search results, with potentially catastrophic results for audiences.
‘Google’s existing controls do not provide publishers with sufficient choice over how their content, provided for general search, is used by Google... Collectively, these limitations can restrict publishers’ abilities to invest in new high-quality content, which leads to detriment for end users’.
We have known for some time that AI overviews in search run the risk of cannibalising news content online. If publishers can’t sustain their businesses, due to rapidly decreasing traffic to their sites, there will be less and less trustworthy content to draw on, with misinformation filling the gaps.
While this is a welcome starter for ten, AI is only one area in which platforms are able to exploit their imbalance of power over publishers. The measure is barely a sticking plaster on the devastation that has been caused by big tech to news outlets.
At the same time as publishing its first set of Conduct Requirements, the CMA also announced that it won’t be publishing its second set, which will force Google to come to the negotiating table with news, until next year.
Local news publishers can’t wait that long - they need support now. Hundreds have already closed, leaving more than four million people living in news deserts. Many communities have no access to local news.
The strength of our bargaining framework means that CMA has the potential to do something to address the worsening situation, but we need to see urgent progress. Local news needs crucial new investment to serve its audiences with the reliable information they need, while big tech sits on vast profits.
The CMA must not wait. Google isn’t going to engage in negotiations until there is an explicit Conduct Requirement to do so. We urge the CMA to follow through with its original timescale and publish the next Conduct Requirements as planned.
As for PINF, we're exploring other ideas to regenerate local news in the UK, taking inspiration from around the world by exploring the scope for a must carry provision for news and a digital levy. More on those ideas soon!
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