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I disagree with @jeffjarvis here. Having worked at medium-size pubs in the past they have a huge fear of collaboration specifically due to antitrust regulation. News organizations have had an severe fear of antitrust and it has prevented them from collaboration in some major ways
Collective bargaining with tech companies who clearly don't give a crap about antitrust is needed. Google's ad tech pulls money out of transactions that occur to bring ads on to publisher sites and they work in ways to enable other actors to also skim money from ad transactions.
That's not counting the fact that tech platforms have aggregated the gateways to content to themselves and then charge creators and publishers a fee to exist in their portals to the web. A problem that could be resolved only with... collective negotiation.
Imagine, for example, if Vox could have gone to YouTube with a coalition of publishers and threatened to renegotiate the terms of hosting or pull content collectively.
Beyond that Jarvis takes issue specifically with the title and he is super wrong. Here's a brief list of ways big tech directly takes money directly out of the pocket of publishers:
- Both app stores take percentages of all the subscriptions that publications take via app
- All ads displayed via app run through one or the other big tech platforms. They take a percent of revenue.
- All ads displayed via app run through one or the other big tech platforms. They take a percent of revenue.
- All ads displayed on the web will likely touch Google's ad infrastructure more than once. Each touch takes some of the revenue that would normally have gone to publishers...
- In order to empower this process Google has pushed for an infrastructure to encourage this behavior and not only does that allow other players to take money that would normally go to publishers. It allows ~70% of ad spend to disappear into ad tech. 
- Then there is both Google and Facebook's push to make user data the currency of the web. This heavily enables billions of dollars of ad fraud which redirect dollars that would normally show ads on legit publishers to instead show them on sketchy or 'fake news' pubs.
Not only does this user targeting not benefit publishers wsj.com/articles/behav…
It also encourages agencies to optimize for user targeting ( theverge.com/2017/1/18/1430… ) while ignoring the fact that most of the result is fraudulent ad views. Google runs exchanges which *directly* profit off of that, even if the fraud is uncovered.
- Because Facebook and Google are effective monopolies in digital display ( wsj.com/articles/the-r…
) especially in local ( wsj.com/graphics/local… ) there is no way for most publishers to effectively negotiate for better conditions.
) especially in local ( wsj.com/graphics/local… ) there is no way for most publishers to effectively negotiate for better conditions.
Facebook and Google might have once presented themselves as more effective competition, but that is no longer the case. They are monopolies now and they use monopolistic power to keep terms heavily disfavoring publishers.
I do think that @Sulliview is correct in that "a four-year antitrust exemption for news publishers" would be an effective counterweight, but I also think it has its own disadvantages (and dangers! If the last few years have proven anything it isn't the scruples of news owners)...
There's an even better better solution. Instead of making it easier for newspapers to act like an additional monopoly to counterbalance the Big Tech monopoly, it would be far better to break up the existing monopoly. I think the best solution would be to break up Google and FB.
It would advantage us all to see less power in Big Tech. Esp. because the technology that advantages them directly sucks power & money from publishers, be it via ad tech skimming, redirection of display towards fraud, or simply by aggregating views to themselves w/pub content.
Anyway, as others have already responded, perhaps the solution is to try and do both. And it could be! Journalists just are going to have to keep much better watch on what media companies do without antitrust oversight than they kept watch on tech companies as they grew freely.
Some good responses on this topic:
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And to be clear, I don't think doing one negates doing the other. We could do both! I just would hope journalists are very measured and focused in how they watchdog both.
