ORDINARILY, if one profits out of other's blood, sweat and tears without permission, it would be called theft.
Or at the very least, a moral wrong. Neither is the right thing to do. But this is what big tech from the Silicon Valley have been doing for so long.
They have been mining news gathered by newspaper companies to earn their fat ad revenues, all for themselves. The fault lies in the business model the big tech are using, what Bloomberg calls "contentfree-for-alls".
This is slowly changing, and rightly so, as governments around the world come to realise that big tech's stealthy ways and their impact on newspaper companies.
On Friday, the Australian government ordered Google and Facebook to negotiate with traditional media in the country on remuneration in good faith. This is no empty threat. If Google and Facebook fail to reach an agreement, things will get nastier: a binding arbitration process and penalties for breaching the media bargaining code of up to A$10 million or 10 per cent of local revenue will kick in. An example for Malaysia to follow? Google calls this Aussie move a "heavy-handed intervention".
Who is talking? For years traditional media companies watched helplessly as tech giants mined away their news gathered at great expense. Many bled out of existence. Big tech didn't care then; they don't care now. Errant behaviour such as this needs to be regulated. Australia's move is to correct what the government says is a power imbalance between two of the world's most profitable companies and a local media industry that's bleeding jobs as it loses advertising revenue to digital platforms, according the Bloomberg's report.
Australia is doing the right thing. This isn't just an Australian problem; it is a European problem and Asian problem as well. In Europe, France has done some Silicon Valley chasing, too. In April, French regulators ordered Google to pay media companies if they wanted to display "snippets of articles".
More interestingly, according to a Bloomberg report disclosing the order on April 9, the Autorite de la concurrence, the French antitrust regulator, said "the search engine giant may have abused its dominant market power, causing serious and immediate harm" to the media.
No one should be surprised. In the words of Bloomberg, European publishers have been pushing regulators for over a decade to tackle the power of Google, which has lured away billions of euros in advertising revenue. This is the first time they have landed a punch.
Time for Asian regulators to do the same. Malaysia must deliver the punch for others in the region to follow. We needn't reinvent the wheel either. Malaysia has a choice: the French one-two or the Australian uppercut. Either will sting like Muhammad Ali's bee. But Malaysian regulators must first get big tech into the ring. They will not volunteer because the "content free-for-alls" model guarantees them free lunch for as long as we allow them to. Like in Australia, Europe and elsewhere, big tech are causing serious and present danger to journalism in Asia. Malaysia isn't an exception.
Google and Facebook know the value news displays bring them. They must pay for using the news. Failing this, like Australia, Malaysian regulators must order them to share the news revenue.