by Chris Menahan, Information Liberation:

Congress’s antitrust probe into Big Tech started Tuesday with Big Media demanding the tech giants give them tons of money because of a junk study media industry lobbyists published in advance of the hearing.

From Forbes:

A congressional panel will today kick off its antitrust investigation into Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook with an examination of the way they affect the news media landscape.

The investigation coincides with the publication of a new report from the News Media Alliance which concludes that Google received an estimated $4.7 billion in revenue last year from crawling and scraping news publishers’ content.

That’s not a coincidence. The News Media Alliance is an media industry lobbyist group.

Today’s hearing by the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, will examine whether current antitrust laws are effective in preventing anti-competitive behaviour.

“I think we’re going to hear about what the impact has been on the news industry as a result of this huge market dominance,” Cicilline says.

This bill will provide a much-needed lifeline to local publishers who have been crushed by Google and Facebook. It’s about time we take a stand on this issue.”

That’s all lies. This is about helping Big Media, not the smaller news sites crushed by Google’s algorithms which were rigged in Big Media’s favor.

Scheduled to testify at the hearing is David Chavern, head of publishers’ campaign group the News Media Alliance. He has pushed hard for the introduction of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, currently making its way through the US Congress, which would allow publishers to negotiate collectively with the platforms.

That bill is a scam.

“Journalism is critical to our civic society. The major tech platforms know this and they extract the value from our reporting without adequately compensating the publishers who create it,” he says. “News publishers need the ability to band together to negotiate a sustainable future for quality journalism.”

The study they cited (and nearly the entire media ran with) is total garbage.

It was debunked by journalist Bill Grueskin on Twitter and by the Columbia Journalism Review.

The figure relies on a comment Marissa Mayer made 11 YEARS AGO. She said Google News was ‘worth $100 million.”

She didn’t say it made $100 million in profit or generated $100 million in revenue.

She just said, offhand, it was worth that …2/5https://t.co/p1V5xFwMBm pic.twitter.com/0dCWAdQLhj

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) 10 June 2019

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