On Table With Big Tech, India Will Have Huge Leverage: Fletcher

According to Australian MP Paul Fletcher, if India is successful in enacting legislation mandating social media sites to pay news publishers, it will have much more clout than nations with smaller populations because of the “bargaining dynamics” of the nation.

“India is a tech superpower. I am amazed by the extraordinary scale of India’s digital market. In bargaining dynamics, when India would come to the table with Big Tech giants, its leverage would be very different to countries with smaller populations,” Fletcher said Tuesday at an event organised by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), an industry association of media companies in India.

The lawmaker was the country’s Minister of Communications when Australia had passed a landmark code that allowed news publishers to seek compensation from Internet platforms. The law, called the News Media Bargaining Code, allows eligible news businesses to bargain individually or collectively with digital platforms over payment for the inclusion of news on the platforms and services.

Fletcher said that if a similar code was to find traction in India, “it will reach the desks of global tech company executives quicker than it did with Australia.” He recommended that India should identify a trigger on which it can introduce a similar rule.

“In our (Australia’s) case, the trigger was the sharp drop in ad revenue of news media outlets during the Covid-19 pandemic. That made us bring in a mandatory Code instead of a voluntary one,” he said.

Fletcher’s remarks come as the  is drafting the Digital India Bill, which will replace the venerable Information Technology Act, 2000. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for electronics and information technology, suggested that one of the aspects of the upcoming Bill be determining the relationship between Internet platforms and content creators and content Monetization Rules for platform-generated and user-generated content.