Okay—we will try that.
I will continue where I left off.
I earned a Ph.D. from Brown University, where my research focused on competition, monopoly and antitrust and has been published in leading academic journals.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about big tech's pattern of coercion in response to regulation and specifically Meta's recent action to block Canadian access to news articles across its platforms in retaliation for the passage of Bill C-18, the Online News Act. This follows a nearly identical action in 2021 by Meta, then Facebook, to extract concessions from Australia with respect to its news media bargaining code.
This discussion comes at a time when the news industry across the globe is in peril. It's an industry I've watched closely since I was a child. I was raised by a journalist. My mother began her career as a reporter for a local paper in rural New England, moving to various editorial roles in minor cities, to the newsroom at The Boston Globe, and then to executive positions at The Boston Globe and GateHouse Media, now Gannett. She now owns several successful, independent local papers in Massachusetts suburbs.
My personal and professional experiences lead me to make two principal points today, the first being about the platforms' business models in this market.
Media companies pay to produce and distribute content that a large mass of readers find valuable. They then sell ads to businesses that want their offerings in front of those readers. On one side, Meta and Google have become a central way for readers to access news media, which gives them power over journalism outlets, with an implicit threat to cut off readership.
On the other side, Meta and Google also have an effective duopoly over digital advertising, and both face or have faced antitrust lawsuits for illegal monopolization in this space.
These companies are not providing viewership so much as using their dual control over Internet traffic and advertising to monetize content that journalists produce at considerable expense. Recent research by economists at the University of Zurich indicates that 40% of Google's total revenue from search advertising would go to publishers and other journalism outlets if it faced more competition. With media companies paying to produce the product [Technical difficulty—Editor]