A minister was replying to a question in the Parliament on the Australian law that forces Google and Facebook to pay for news, the Indian minister said there’s no such law planned for now.
The Indian government doesn’t have any plans yet of making big tech companies like Google and Facebook pay publishers for news. This question was raised at the ongoing winter session in the Lok Sabha to which the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) answered and confirmed that there are no plans for such a law right now.
The question was asked by Shashi Tharoor, a member of parliament, referring to the law passed in Australia earlier this year that forces digital companies like Google and Facebook to pay media publishers for news, and if any similar law or regulation is being planned for India. Tharoor also asked if the government “has any concerns about the market power and dominance of platforms such as Google and Facebook.”
“Personally, there is no proposal for enactment of a law by this Ministry in this regard,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology (IT) said.
“Government is aware of the growing risks of the dominance of various big tech platforms on the internet and is deploying tools and capabilities to deal with the same including actively working with social media intermediaries,” the minister added.
The Australian government earlier this year, in February, passed a law that forced digital companies like Google and Facebook to pay for any news used on their platforms. The law proposal was earlier met with backlash from both the companies with Facebook even banning access to news in Australia. The law was proposed to address the market dominance of Google and Facebook in Australia. But both companies later struck deals with media firms in Australia to pay for news.
