The legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday said it would continue cross-party negotiations over a draft news media and digital platform bargaining act after lawmakers failed to reach consensus on all of its articles.
The committee was scheduled to review six bills proposed by lawmakers about the draft act.
The bills proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) and Wang Hong-wei (王鴻薇) would make it mandatory for large international platforms to negotiate with Taiwanese news media over the pricing of online news content, while one proposed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Michelle Lin (林楚茵) does not make the practice mandatory.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
Bills proposed by DPP Legislator Lin I-chin (林宜瑾) and the Taiwan People’s Party caucus said that news media should be paid for their online content through a digital news development fund, while one proposed by DPP Legislator Fan Yun (范雲) states that news media could be paid through a fund or by bargaining with digital platforms.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs, which would enforce the act, did not propose a draft.
However, several lawmakers expressed reservations about passing the draft act. After Canada passed the Online News Act in June 2023, Meta disabled push notifications for news produced by Canadian outlets in August that year, consequently reducing the views of the Canadian news by 11 million times per day by August last year, they said.
DPP Legislator Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑) said that news media are entitled to a fair share of profits generated from online news content, but how the policy should be enforced needs careful consideration.
“After similar legislation was passed in Canada and Australia, digital platforms blocked the views of news from both countries. The same situation could happen in Taiwan if such legislation was passed. Readers, news media and platform operators would all lose,” Hsu said.
DPP Legislator Chen Su-yu (陳素月) also urged the committee to halt the review of the bills and give the digital ministry time to communicate with platform operators.
The US government has considered similar laws in other countries as trade barriers, and passing the act could complicate Taiwan’s tariff negotiations with the US, she said.
Wang said that digital platforms have reaped a substantial amount of advertising revenue from news content, but the outlets creating the content do not share it.
KMT Legislator Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said the act would balance the bargaining power between news media and digital platforms, and safeguard the public’s right to know.
“If we let this status quo persist, news media would be left with no resources to grow, and the Internet would be inundated with articles with sensational headlines produced by ad-driven content farms,” he said.
Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-ching (林宜敬) said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday said that his government is considering repealing the Online News Act.
This shows that the act, despite its good intent, was difficult to implement, he said.
The ministry is creating a joint profit-sharing platform with support from the National Science and Technology Council, which would ensure that all media outlets can earn subscription revenue through a unified system that combines centralized fundraising and automatic revenue sharing, he said.
Subscribers to the platform would pay NT$300 per month, and the revenue would be divided based on the number of clicks on the content generated by each media outlet, he said.
The ministry is communicating with Meta and Google about making donations to the platform, he said, adding that the proposal was warmly received by Google and news media, including the Central News Agency.
“We hope the committee would give us more time to communicate with digital platforms, the Ministry of Culture and the National Communications Commission [NCC],” he said. “If lawmakers still find the act to be necessary after seeing how the platform works, we would welcome the development as well.”
The Ministry of Culture regulates print media, while NCC oversees the operations of broadcast media.
A government media fund could contravene regulations banning direct and indirect investment from the government, political parties and the military, the NCC said.
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