Rupert Murdoch calls for Facebook and Google to subsidize the news business
Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of publishing empire News Corporation, issued a statement today proposing a new licensing deal between media organizations and platform-owning tech companies. His goal: get entities like Facebook and Google to pay money to publishers, effectively in exchange for the value news outlets bring to those platforms.
Citing the popularization of “scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable,” Murdoch says Facebook and Google should pay money in an arrangement similar to so-called carriage fees. These fees are the money paid by cable and satellite television providers to local, over-the-air broadcast stations for the right to carry local...