These local newspapers say Facebook and Google are killing them. Now they're fighting back. [View all]
Washington Post
By Margaret Sullivan
Media columnist
Feb. 4, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Lurking behind a groundbreaking lawsuit recently filed in federal court in West Virginia is a haunting question: What if?
What if local newspapers had been able to compete successfully for digital advertising revenue as their readers moved online? What if the powerful “duopoly” of Google and Facebook hadn’t sucked up all the oxygen in this new digital economy, essentially asphyxiating traditional media by depriving it of the ad dollars needed to survive?
Would the newspaper industry be healthier — and therefore would our democracy be healthier? Is there still time for an industry to get up off its death bed?
The people behind this antitrust lawsuit hope to find out. Although there is no dollar figure identified in the complaint, West Virginia attorney Paul Farrell, who filed it, thinks the numbers could be astronomical: The two behemoth companies have pocketed billions of dollars in ad revenue — more than half of all the digital advertising dollars in 2019, for example — while newspapers have been struggling to replace the print-ad dollars that once sustained them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/west-virginia-google-facebook-newspaper-lawsuit/2021/02/03/797631dc-657d-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5_story.html
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