Will Address Imbalance In Digital News Creation & Monetisation: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

The government is looking to address the imbalance in content creation by digital news companies and its monetisation in the upcoming draft Digital India Act, according to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology.

Speaking at an event by the Digital News Publishers Association in New Delhi on Friday (January 20), Chandrasekhar said, “We hope to address this issue of disproportionate control and imbalance of dynamics between content creation and its monetisation and the power that ad-tech companies and platforms hold today.”

The MoS added that the dynamics of content creation and its monetisation are impacted by an imbalance due to the structure of the internet, adding that it leaves smaller companies disadvantaged.

“It is not the right thing for a country like ours where we have potentially hundreds of thousands of small content creators and many value, truth-driven news organisations,” Chandrasekhar said.

In any case, the government might want to look at other countries and how they have approached the issue. Chandrasekhar mentioned at the event that the government might follow a path similar to Australia.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) submitted a 623-page report to the Australian government in 2019, which was focused on the impact of digital platforms on the choice and quality of news and journalism.

The ACCC said in the report that the imbalance between how content from traditional broadcasting and digital platforms was treated from a regulatory perspective was distortionary and should be addressed by the government.

One way of doing the same could be to bring all forms of news outlets under one regulatory ambit. India has done the same by bringing digital news platforms under the ambit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which also regulates traditional news outlets such as newspapers and TV channels.

Paul Fletcher, a member of the Australian House of Representatives and the country’s former communications minister, told ET that India should look to pass legislation with enabling mechanisms to bring Big Tech companies and news, media and content publishers together to work out commercial deals.

Fletcher, who was also speaking at the event, stated that while he did not wish to tell India what to do, there were lessons to be learned from the way Australia handled the subject.

Chandrasekhar’s comments come months after several digital news outlets reached out to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) against Google, alleging that the tech giant was abusing its dominance in news aggregation.

The allegations were made by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), an industry body that primarily consists of legacy media houses operating in digital media.

For now, the matter is under probe by the competition watchdog. If found guilty, Google might be looking at the business end of another hefty penalty.

Google does allow digital news outlets to monetise their content. In 2021, the tech giant launched Google News Showcase for Android and iOS, selecting 30 Indian digital news providers to partner with and provide news content in English and Hindi.

That year, the tech giant also launched a 16-week accelerator programme to train, support and scale digital news startups in India, the Google News Initiative (GNI) Startups Lab programme.