News for All

In 2023, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill (now Act) was introduced in the House of Commons, triggering a year-long process for PINF and our coalition to support the bill's passage with some key amendments.​

Among other crucial aims, the DMCC sets out to introduce a competitive, level playing field in the UK's digital marketplace by empowering the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to 'designate' and regulate its largest players.

These include Alphabet and Meta, which under the new framework will be required to negotiate with news providers (among others) and, potentially, fairly compensate them for the value their news content generates.​

After advocating on behalf of the indie news at every stage of the legislative process, speaking with senior policymakers in Government and the Opposition, we secured and supported amendments to the Act to: ​​

• Confirm that collective bargaining is allowed for the purposes of the bill, meaning small, indie publishers should be able to band together to negotiate fair terms with designated big tech firms.
• Remove Secretary of State discretion over the turnover threshold for big tech companies to be designated.
• Give the Secretary of State a limited 30-day timeframe instead of an open-ended period to approve CMA guidance.
• Require the CMA to publish full notices of their regulatory decisions instead of summaries, allowing for more transparency.

This was made possible in no small part due to the more than 100 indie publishers that PINF, through our campaign organsers, mobilised to directly contact their MPs and make their voices heard.

With the Act receiving Royal Assent in May 2024, we set our sights on ensuring the new regulatory regime, which the new Digital Markets Unit (DMU) in the CMA will oversee, works as well for its small, independent parties as it does its largest and most powerful corporations.​

In addition to regularly engaging with the DMU throughout the legislative process, PINF made a submission to the regulator in July 2024, responding the consultation on its Competition Regime Draft Guidance. We recommended that:​

• The regime must be time-efficient to serve its purpose.
• Algorithm investigations must be retrospective.
• Consultations must be accessible to smaller parties.
• Clarity and flexibility on collective bargaining are needed.
• The 5-year forward-looking assessment should not undermine regulation.

​We anticipate that the DMU will issue its final guidance in Autumn 2024. It will then need to be approved by the Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, allowing it to begin the process of regulating the most powerful companies in the world. We hope to see the considerations we recommended reflected in the final guidance.

Once the new regime is up and running, commercial negotiations between news providers can begin.​

PINF is now exploring how to best support the indie news sector in negotiating for fair compensation with tech giants that are designated in the new regulatory regime.

In the meantime, we are also working to determine the value of news to Google along with behavioural economists at FehrAdvice, a Swiss firm.

The collapse of revenues from print advertising was the starting point for the financial woes that still plague news publishers today, as the Cairncross Review notes. In a decade and a half, UK advertising overwhelmingly migrated from print to digital, with the share of online ad spend ballooning from 16% in 2007 to 78% in 2023.

This shift created a stark system of haves and have nots, with hundreds of news publishers in the UK (and thousands globally) losing their main source of revenue to two American companies.​These are Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), which over the last two decades have established themselves as both advertising brokers and vendors.

In practice, that means these two companies' various products dominate nearly every step of every transaction in digital advertising. The near-universal penetration of Google Search has allowed it to cannibalise more than 90% of search ads in the UK - some £14bn in 2023 - while parties that still want to advertise with news publishers have almost no choice but to go through Google AdSense and Google Ad Manager due to their parent company's monopolistic grip on the market.

It is important to note here that while news publishers' share of revenue is shrinking, UK ad spend overall is actually on the rise. In 2023, advertisers spent £37bn in the UK, compared with £23.6bn five years earlier.Put simply, news providers continue to drive potential consumers (readers) to search engines and social media platforms. Advertisers continue to pay increasingly hefty sums of money to place ads in front of those consumers. But the news providers receive nearly none of the spoils.The democratic and social fallout of the crisis in local news notwithstanding, this system simply does not make commercial sense. To restore competition in the UK's digital marketplace, these news providers must be fairly compensated for their work.