Why Google, Facebook must pay for news content worldwide

The shutting down of several newspapers’ print editions amid the coronavirus lockdown has magnified the problem of Google and Facebook snatching up news content from media organisations and making a profit for themselves. A pittance is paid to the publishers through Google’s and Facebook’s advertisements on the web pages it disseminates.

In fact, once the duopoly of Google and Facebook was established over the years, news organisations were made to compete with each other to get on Google News’ top results by paying to be displayed prominently. Google also introduced Google amp, whereby the web page would load faster but with a Google dominant url and Google ads served along with the content.