While a government bailout for newspapers is unlikely there is discussion of rolling back antitrust laws to help them boost revenue.

From FT.com

Mr Kerry, chairman of the Senate Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee, said lawmakers would investigate these and other proposals. The investigation period could well be dominated by one of the more controversial suggestions by publishers.

At a secret meeting in San Diego in April, representatives of the nation’s top newspapers first broached the subject of temporarily relaxing antitrust laws preventing price-fixing in the industry. This would allow publishers to begin discussing how they can be compensated by online news aggregators such as Google for linking to and using excerpts of their stories.

“We’re going to examine very closely . . . the precise flow of a particular story and look at the rewards that attach to each side,” said Mr Kerry, adding that a second hearing would likely convene over the summer. Google has long argued publishers can opt out of the search engine’s index by adding a few lines of programming code to their website or story files.

“Unless we act as a group, we’ll be doomed to failure,” James Moroney, chief executive of the Dallas Morning News, told the FT, confirming the San Diego meeting took place.

It was presided over by a lawyer to ensure no laws were broken. Mr Kerry said he was not certain if a temporary rollback of antitrust rules would work, as online news aggregators can simply wait until paid-for news content reaches its time limit and becomes free. But, he said: “It is conceivable if you allowed [talks between newspaper publishers] you could then have some sort of an agreement on a lowest common denominator offer that . . . serves both interests – bringing more people to [the news aggregator’s] site and also saving the expertise and reporting capacity of the [newspapers].”

Are these the same newspaper execs that campaign for sunshine laws to make government meetings open?  What happened to transparency?  I guess it only applies to others.

 

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