In the latest development on disputes between big tech companies and media organizations over payment for reusing news content, Facebook on Oct. 21 signed a multiyear agreement with a French publishers’ lobbying group to pay for news content shared by its users. The legal basis for such remuneration originated in EU digital copyright law reform in 2019, which extended “neighboring rights” to snippets released by publishers.
Google also reached similar deals with French news publishers earlier this year. In February, the Australian parliament passed the News Media Bargaining Code to force Google and Facebook to negotiate with news providers for the payment of shared content.
These movements have sparked enthusiastic discussion in Taiwan. Associations representating newspapers, publishers and other media are strongly urging the government to take remedial action. Legislators across party lines have called for the government to step in with the view, among others, that media and freedom of speech are the cornerstones of democracy.
The most critical problem for the government has always been which ministry or authority should be in charge of the matter.
Minister Without Portfolio Kuo Yau-hwang (郭耀煌) said that this is an issue requiring collaboration across multiple ministries, utilizing the expertise of different professions and disciplines. This author feels, however, that Taiwan has not yet decided to enact a new law, not even an outline of possible measures to respond to the matter, so even if a responsible authority is designated, the time for enacting such laws is uncertain.
Looking at the structuring of digital ads, Google and Facebook act as “regulators” on their platforms, where publishers sell space for advertisements. Publishers or advertisers interact according to models designed by Google or Facebook, including prices for buying and selling ads, but there is insufficient transparency on the rules for transactions.
Given that many aspects of how platforms function are not well understood, neither by academics nor government authorities, the imbalance between news publishers and the major gateways to the Internet would only worsen, particularly when accompanied by the extreme use of data collection by the incumbent tech giants.
Google and Facebook have an incredibly large impact on individuals, businesses and society, and this intrinsically unfair competition environment should be addressed.
Theoretically, clauses providing neighboring rights do not exist in the Copyright Act (著作權法); therefore the European model is not the optimal choice for Taiwan.
However, competition law can play a constructive role in the evolution of a digital economy. Even though competition law is not a proper tool for the purpose of facilitating negotiations on prices between specific parties, its enforcement could help create a healthier business environment in which all participants can act freely and fairly.
The Fair Trade Act (公平交易法) includes a provision that is not found in US or EU competition law, and could be seen as a reflection of Taiwanese values with its “catchall” function. Under Article 25 of the law, “no enterprise shall otherwise have any deceptive or obviously unfair conduct that is able to affect trading order” which is not otherwise provided by the act.
The Fair Trade Commission’s “Guidelines on the Application of Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act” include “exploiting the fruits of others’ work” as an example to indicate obviously unfair means when engaging in market competition or commercial transactions.
The free use of news by digital advertising platforms is no doubt a new category of problematic conduct on the digital landscape. Therefore, innovative thinking and new theories for enforcement must be considered. Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act is well-suited to be applied by the competition enforcer to examine if any unfair and illegal exploitative practices could possibly be implemented by Google and Facebook, which could consequently harm newspapers and media in Taiwan.
Wei Hsin-fang is a Fair Trade Commission commissioner. All the opinions expressed in this article are solely her own.
The White House’s decision to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel Corp is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at US$20.47 a share last August, the US chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a US$43 billion return. One of the reasons the investment has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Howard personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients imaginable. They include Nvidia Corp, the company at the heart of the AI
A single photograph can cut through a lot of noise, but it can also be used to misrepresent the truth. At the very least, it can concentrate the mind on something that requires further investigation. On Monday last week, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation CEO Tai Hsia-ling (戴遐齡) and former National Security Council secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) held a news conference in which they showed a photograph of former foundation CEO Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑), now Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) deputy chairman. In the image Hsiao is seated next to Xiamen Taiwan Businessmen Association chairman Han Ying-huan (韓螢煥). The two men were holding
I first met Professor Ray Jiing (井迎瑞) as a film and documentary student at Shih Hsin University’s (SHU) Department of Radio Television and Film in 1988. The following year, he went on to become the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive — forerunner of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Over his eight-year tenure, Jiing rescued and restored over 200 classic Taiwanese films. In 1997, he established the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary and Film Archiving at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and I joined the program in his third cohort of students. Beyond a
President William Lai Ching-te’s (賴清德) May 20 second-anniversary address was not just a routine policy review; it was damage control. US President Donald Trump’s remarks — that he did not want to see anyone move toward independence and that the delivery of a major Taiwan arms package could depend on the progress of US-China relations — unsettled Taiwan’s public and created an opening for opposition parties to question whether Taiwan was being treated as a bargaining chip in Washington’s dealings with Beijing. Lai’s speech was designed to close that opening. The address covered the expected ground: sovereignty, cross-strait relations, defense spending,
RSS