(Tribune News Service) — A bill to make Google and Facebook pay publishers for news presented on their platforms faces a do-or-die test Thursday in a state government chamber notorious as a killing ground for prospective laws.

California Assembly Bill 886 would force the technology giants to shell out negotiated annual, lump-sum fees into a fund for news outlets, or be forced into mediation or arbitration to negotiate paying media companies a share of their digital-ads revenue.

On Thursday, the bill, called the California Journalism Preservation Act and introduced by East Bay state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, will be taken up in the semi-annual “suspense file” hearing in the state Senate appropriations committee. It’s a secretive process that could see AB 886 spiked in the bloodbath that winnows down hundreds of pending bills before the annual Aug. 31 bill-passage deadline.

“Usually bills that go to suspense go to suspense to die,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University who has been tracking the bill. Although a majority of bills that end up in the suspense file die there, the fate of AB 886 remains uncertain, McCuan believes, and the bill’s status may be “more about pause and consideration than it is about killing.”

Legislators and parties to the process — which include tech industry lobbyists, news publishers and digital-media startups — are negotiating a possible resolution, which could include an amended version of the bill or a compensation deal not involving a new law.

Major tech firms could offer a non-legislative solution that would provide money to news companies, said Robert Singleton, regional director of policy and public affairs for Chamber of Progress, a lobby group representing Google, Meta and other tech companies. “I think there will be some kind of agreement for some financial support for journalism in the state of California,” Singleton said.

However, the California News Publishers Association said a law is necessary to ensure tech platforms comply with any agreements on compensating news outlets.

The bill, co-authored by assembly members Bill Essayli, a Riverside Republican, and Josh Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, passed the state Assembly in June 2023.

Wicks, whose office cited the negotiations in declining Wednesday to comment on the bill, noted in a June hearing that news outlets have “downsized and closed at alarming rates.” As news moved online and major internet platforms gained broad reach, publishers were required by circumstance to allow their content onto the platforms, with “little to no compensation,” Wicks said.

More than 2,500 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. California has lost more than 100 news organizations in the past decade, Wicks has said.

In the June hearing, Google’s vice president of global news partnerships Jaffer Zaidi argued that the bill rested on a “flawed premise” that internet platforms grab news for profit without compensation. Google Search sends “billions of visits” daily to websites of news publishers of all sizes, giving them “valuable free traffic,” Zaidi said.

Amendments to the bill show progress in bringing the parties together, so legislation or a deal are possible, but time is short, McCuan said. Political horse-trading among legislators and the Governor’s office could lead to the bill getting sacrificed, he said.

Or AB 886 could be killed on orders from above, McCuan said. Newsom would have to sign the bill to make it law, and although Big Tech is “right up there” with Big Tobacco and Big Oil as “big, bad bogeymen,” striking a blow against Silicon Valley, especially in an election year, may not appeal to him, McCuan said.

“He doesn’t want to have to make this call,” McCuan said.

A spokesman for Newsom said Wednesday that he “will evaluate this bill on its merits should it reach his desk.”

If AB 886 fails to make it past the suspense hearing, the demonstrated political will for getting Google and Meta to pay for news in California could spawn new attempts to create law, McCuan said.

“There may need to be a little more time to figure out what the right model is for legislation to move forward,” McCuan said.

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Houston released a paper in November that estimated Google’s revenue linked to news media search results amounted to $21 billion a year. Meta gathers nearly $4 billion a year from news on U.S. Facebook feeds, the researchers said.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which represents Google, Meta and other tech giants, has been running high-profile ads saying AB 886 would subsidize “national and global media corporations.” Singleton said traditional media outlets have fallen victim to a changing media landscape, but new, digital news startups are finding success, including a Pulitzer Prize for Lookout Santa Cruz.

“Those that are more nimble and flexible,” Singleton said, “have been able to adapt.”

The top lawyer for the California News Publishers Association — to which this news organization belongs — noted that a federal judge ruled last week that Google had an illegal monopoly on internet search.

“A large amount of the search results are news coverage: It’s usually 40% to 60%,” Brittney Barsotti said. “They give users accurate information by crawling and scraping news content, and we’re not being compensated.

“The decline in advertising revenue — which has gone straight to the platforms — plays a large part in the struggle of the news industry. If the legislators don’t act now, there are not going to be news publications left.”

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