Govt to address imbalance between news content creation and its monetisation: MoS IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Chandrasekhar was speaking at an event by the Digital News Publishers Association in New Delhi on Friday.

“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 minister said.

The dynamics of content creation and its monetisation is impacted by a “deeply inbuilt imbalance” due to the structure of the internet, and it leaves smaller organisations severely disadvantaged, he added.

“It is not really 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.

To solve this issue, the government could follow a path similar to that of Australia, he said.

Discover the stories of your interest

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) had in 2019 submitted a 623-page report to the Australian government focusing on the “impact of digital platforms on the choice and quality of news and journalism”. In its report, the ACCC said the “imbalance in the regulatory treatment of content delivered via traditional Broadcasting”, compared to digital platforms such as Meta Inc (formerly Facebook) and Google, was “distortionary” and should be addressed by the government.

On Thursday, Paul Fletcher, a member of the Australian House of Representatives and the country’s former communications minister, told ET that India and other nations 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.

During his address on Friday, Fletcher reiterated that while he did not wish to tell regulators in India or anywhere else how they should deal with this issue going forward, there were lessons to be learnt from Australia’s handling of the subject.