One more fault line between the world's tech giants.
On Monday February 22, one of them, Microsoft, announced that it had signed an alliance with four European media associations (The European Magazine Media Association, European Newspaper Publishers Association, European Publishers Council and News Media Europe) which represent more than 'a thousand publishers.
An alliance that is part of the discussions on the implementation of neighboring rights, approved by the European Parliament in 2019 and adapted since last year in French law.
The signatories say in particular that they want to find together
"a solution which ensures that European press publishers are paid for the use of their content by the 'gatekeeper' platforms which dominate the market"
and
"must include an arbitration mechanism"
for ensure equitable agreements.
By this gesture, Microsoft marks its disagreement with its competitors Facebook or Google, who seek, them, to escape this extension of copyright created by the EU in order to pay publishers for the use of their content by large platforms.
Google has certainly signed agreements with part of the French press, but it opposes the Australian bill aimed at obliging it to pay the media for the exploitation of their content.
Facebook, for its part, is emerging from a standoff with the Australian government during which the social network purely and simply temporarily blocked all information content in order to exert pressure.
Microsoft recognizes an imbalance
The alliance between Microsoft and the European press marks a stage in the tumultuous negotiations on neighboring rights, which are likely to continue in Australia, but also in all the countries where the American platforms operate.
In particular, it gives the Redmond IT group the opportunity to recognize the de facto imbalance between the stakeholders in the discussions.
“
Even if newspaper publishers have a neighboring right, they might not have enough economic clout to negotiate fair and balanced deals with those tech companies that dominate and control the market.
These could threaten to withdraw from the negotiations or to completely leave the markets
”, thus indicate Microsoft and the European editors in their joint statement.
Microsoft allows itself this step aside while these two rivals Facebook and Google as well as Amazon monopolize two thirds of the global online advertising market.
The IT giant, publisher of leading operating systems and software, owns the Bing search engine, which is a very small minority compared to Google.