Save the free press: just 1 cent per click!

What if all professionals paid 1 cent every time a visitor clicks on one of the hyperlinks they offer? Then the press, and other producers, would finally be paid a fair price for the value they add.

The independent press is struggling. Subscriptions have stalled and advertising revenue is dwindling. Visitors to news websites do not want to pay for the content. Paywalls do not work well: very few regular visitors opt for a subscription. There is no smooth micropayment system for paying small amounts per article read. A service like Blendle, in effect a way of organising micropayments, is not flourishing, to say the least. What is paid for online use goes through a complex system of advertising. The bulk of the advertiser’s money, however, does not end up with the press, but with players like Google and Facebook, either directly or through their ad agencies.

The current system rewards not the press, the producers, but those who distribute the news and make it accessible. Without denying the latter’s importance, matters do seem lopsided. Lopsided enough, at any rate, for the press to appear to be heading for its Waterloo, while Google has money enough to develop self-driving cars and other expensive toys well outside its own line of business.

Google, and many other intermediaries, can go about their pleasure-giving business thanks to European directives dealing with copyright and with the liability (or rather, the non-liability) of intermediaries. Those directives make referring to other parties’ websites by hyperlink ‘free’. Google does not need permission from the owner of the webpage to do so. And neither does anyone else who places a link on their page.

All laws serve a purpose. That includes the EU directives. One of their purposes is to make the joys of modern times available to all. Modern digital communication should therefore be free, there should be no curb on referring to other websites, and access should indeed be unlimited. That is good. The law should serve technological development. But that is not its only purpose. The law, and copyright law in particular, also has to serve the interests of producers and journalists, and encourage them to produce plentifully and with variety. A wide-ranging supply is vital to our society.

The balance between these two purposes, freedom on the one hand and the protection of producers’ interests on the other, is currently missing. The freedom to hyperlink leads to an accumulation of money with intermediaries, while the messengers themselves are close to going under.

The law is a human creation. This law is no longer fit for purpose. So legislators must act.

The European Union has acknowledged these problems. They are working on it. Publishers and European civil servants are pushing for an extra neighbouring right for publishers, and a new European directive is in preparation that should contain this ‘publishers’ right’. It resembles copyright: under it, publishers can prohibit others from using their press publications. Most publishers already enjoy that right, incidentally, under ‘ordinary’ copyright: many journalists are employed by publishers or have transferred their copyright to them. The proposal has the air of a desperate attempt. Sympathetic at first sight, but unsuited to solving the problem.

The new rules will not fix the hyperlink problem, the imbalance between producers and intermediaries. But the decision to let the hyperlink be ‘free’ is a political choice. A choice that could have gone the other way, and one that many now feel should have gone the other way. If we decide now that it has to change, we can change it. It is very simple, even: make the intermediaries pay every time a visitor clicks on one of the links they offer.

One cent per click seems a reasonable amount. That is a CPM of €10. In other words, for every 1,000 clicks the intermediary pays €10. That way the press and other content suppliers would finally receive direct payment for their work.

Simple, and legally straightforward, even though this position runs against the way the Court of Justice of the European Union currently views hyperlinks. But the Court of Justice interprets the law; it does not make it. That is for the European legislator. And there are good reasons for the change. Nothing less than the preservation of one of the cornerstones of our democratic process, the free press, is at stake.

Is the 1 cent rule technically feasible? Of course. Anyone with an inkling of the way almost all internet advertising is currently served knows that there is an endlessly complex digital administration behind it, registering not only which visitors come from which websites but also who those visitors are (or at least which computers they use). The system proposed here is wondrously simple by comparison. Only the visits need to be counted and settled. Both the press (the publisher, in this jargon) and the intermediaries can join one of many platforms. Most of them already have, as it happens. There is thus no need to create a new collecting society, save perhaps for the part of the mandatory payments that rightholders are not collecting themselves.

The result will probably be an increase in the fees charged by players like Google and Facebook. But the fact that a news website cannot be kept alive on those fees means they are now unhealthily, terminally, low.

What counts as an intermediary needs to be interpreted broadly. Every professional party that links to anyone else simply has to pay. The freedom to offer hyperlinks itself, however, remains exactly as it is now.

It will be the professionals who have to pay. The line between an amateur who does not pay and a professional who does will not always be clear. That blurred line affects only a limited group. To limit arguments about it, we can decide to start charging the 1 cent only above 1,000 clicks. We will also have to fight robots clicking away to make money for their shady clients. But that is old news too: the battle has been going on for years.

Then there is another issue: many website owners want plenty of visitors. They would like to remove every barrier to clicking, including the barrier of that 1 cent which would be due to them. The rule could be designed so that intermediaries only pay organisations that register on one of the collection networks. That could create a problem of its own, though: a party like Google might decide to show hyperlinks only to unregistered parties. That would defeat the object. Better, then, to make payment universal. Websites that thrive on visitor numbers can use their revenue to buy more advertising, or to pay the higher fees. And if Google then decides to show hyperlinks only to parties who pay Google, I suspect Google is abusing its power. Above all, uniform mandatory payment would stop parties on the supplier side being played off against each other.

The 1 cent rule restores the balance between the press and the intermediaries, distorted by the course EU legislation has taken. That restoration is in everybody’s interest. In the end, in the intermediaries’ interest too. If a varied supply disappears, so does their own relevance. Operating signposts in a desert is not a sustainable business model.