Banking Reaches for Privacy Consensus; Commerce Staffs Meet Again
The Senate Banking Committee is looking for bipartisan consensus on data privacy issues, but and not yet considering its own bill (see 1905070066), ranking member Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told us. Members will discuss data privacy during a hearing Tuesday with a GAO official and a privacy expert. The House Antitrust Subcommittee plans a hearing that day on big tech’s impact on journalism (see 1906060065).
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“People are increasingly concerned about the power of these companies that have so much of our data and make money from it,” Brown said. He said Republicans are concerned about government mishandling data, while the private sector has gotten Democrats’ attention, but “we hope we can come together on this.” Brown and Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, urged collaboration between the Senate Commerce and other committees on privacy (see 1905160021).
Commerce’s privacy group held a staff-level meeting last week, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told us: There continues to be “goodwill.” Separate members have had conversations, but the six lawmakers haven’t all gotten together since the initial meeting in April, Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., told us. He said the group is “socializing some of the ideas” to include in the bill. Federal pre-emption, FTC authority and a private right of action are among divisive issues.
Government doesn’t regulate news industry content, but somehow Facebook and Google do, said News Media Alliance President David Chavern, who will testify before House Judiciary members. The committee’s recent decision to probe tech industry competition (see 1906060032) shows there’s bipartisan consensus for exploring antitrust issues, Chavern said. He urged support for a bill (see 1904030064) from ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., and House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., that would allow news publishers to negotiate collectively with the tech industry over content production and revenue. Silicon Valley determines everything about the “news experience,” Chavern said: “We at least need the chance to organize and fight for a digital future for news.”
Chavern is expected to tell Congress of the need for “sustainable business relationships that actually return value to the great and important journalists who create the news content.” His prepared testimony says Google received $2.1 billion in U.S. revenue in 2004, compared with the newspaper industry’s $48 billion of advertising revenue. In 2017, Google’s U.S. revenue jumped to $52.4 billion, while the newspaper industry’s ad revenue fell to $16.4 billion.
Google collected about $4.7 billion in 2018 revenue from “crawling and scraping news publishers’ content -- without paying the publishers for that use,” the NMA reported Monday. Google search results are about 16 to 40 percent news, the organization said. “News publishers need to continue to invest in quality journalism, and they can’t do that if the platforms take what they want without paying for it,” Chavern said.
The study’s “back of the envelope calculations” are inaccurate, a company spokesperson emailed, saying the “overwhelming number of news queries” don’t show ads. “Every month Google News and Google Search drives over 10 billion clicks to publishers’ websites, which drive subscriptions and significant ad revenue.”
Tuesday’s Banking witnesses are GAO Financial Markets and Community Investment Director Alicia Cackley and World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon. The U.S. should establish voluntary privacy standards as an alternative to enacting federal pre-emptive privacy legislation, Dixon said. She plans to push World Privacy Forum’s discussion draft. It calls for “a fair, inclusive, and transparent process to govern the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of personal information.” Dixon noted the FDA has been successful using such standards, for example. WPF pushed back on suggestions the draft amounts to industry self-regulation. “They are standards that are rigorously defined and ensure due process,” the organization said.
The U.S. needs a federal privacy bill that pre-empts state law, said Software & Information Industry Association Senior Director-Technology Policy Sara DePaul. SIIA was one of several groups to offer the Senate Banking Committee advice on its data privacy effort (see 1904040073). The association opposes private right of action but supports FTC authority over common carriers and nonprofits, to fine companies on first offenses and to establish narrow rulemaking. A private right of action raises concerns for small businesses because of litigation costs, DePaul said. It would mean a sharp increase in private settlements over technical matters, instead of public agreements with implications for the entire market, she said.