Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, Hawaii and New York all have proposed legislation this year to recoup money from Big Tech platforms, mainly Google and Meta, for revenue gained from publishing local news content.
These bills follow California’s handshake deal with Google, announced last August, that would allocate about $125 million over five years from the state and Google toward California’s local journalism. Additional funds would establish a National AI Accelerator. This deal designated the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to distribute the funds, though Politico reported in January that the school has declined to host this partnership.
Over the past few years, several states have passed legislation to support local news in various ways. In 2024, Illinois passed an employment tax credit to subsidize the hiring and retaining of local news reporters plus legislation requiring local media outlets to give 120 days’ notice to employees and the community before being sold. New York’s Newspaper and Broadcast Media Jobs Program, passed last year, provides up to $90 million of subsidies over three years to retain and hire newsroom workers. Washington passed a bill to waive the business and occupation tax for news publishers, and that state, New Mexico and California also have created programs that allocate funds to support journalism fellowships. New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium allocates grants to civic information producers, and this January Maryland passed a tax credit bill to support the state’s news organizations.
The five states seeking compensation from Big Tech in 2025 remain on a legislative path, straying from California’s decision to undergo negotiations outside of the legislative process. Instead, these states proposed bills that follow one of two primary frameworks: a tax or a bargaining code.
Bills establishing bargaining codes, such as those in Illinois, Oregon and New York, require collective negotiations between tech platforms and news organizations to determine a fair market value for journalism published on tech sites. The remaining states, Hawaii and Washington, propose taxes on tech platforms that utilize local news content.
Matt Pearce, senior policy advisor for the nonprofit Rebuild Local News, said Oregon’s SB686 and Washington’s SB5400, both introduced in January, are the only two bills of the five to gain traction to sar. “In terms of genuine active legislation, it’s really about Oregon and Washington,” he said.
The Washington approach
The most recent version of Washington’s SB5400 proposes a tax surcharge on search engine and social media companies that utilize local news content, with the intention of generating an estimated $20 million annually for a new Washington Local Journalism Corps Program.
“The vision there is to make sure the platforms that are benefiting from this local content are also contributing back to creating more local content,” said Washington State Sen. Marko Liias, who sponsored the bill.
The Corps Program, established in the bill, would support journalistic employment through grants distributed based on the number of reporters employed by each local news source.
“We’re trying to make sure that whether it’s a daily paper or an online site or a broadcaster, our communities have a diversity of local journalism perspectives,” Liias said, noting that the goal is to “try to rebuild and sustain the kind of voices that people are used to listening to and used to getting their news from so that those will continue to be there.”
Pearce said although the Washington bill shows promise, he has concerns about its compliance with the Federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibits states from imposing taxes on internet transactions.
“That bill very specifically says we’re taxing social media companies and search engines, which is a type of commerce that can only happen over the internet,” Pearce said. “So it’s not totally clear to me if that concept could survive a legal challenge.”
The Oregon approach
Oregon’s bill takes a different approach, opting for the bargaining-code model.
In an April 9 public hearing, State Sen. Khanh Pham, chief sponsor of Oregon SB686, said this bill marries the best models of local journalism legislation, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium and the now-abandoned California Journalism Preservation Act. The bill provides tech companies with two compensation options: Pay a direct lump sum of $122 million annually or enter into arbitration to determine a fair market value for the news content used on their sites.
Ninety percent of the funding generated from these options would be distributed to media outlets in amounts determined by the number of reporters they employ. The remaining 10% would go to the Oregon Civic Information Consortium, a program established through the bill to distribute funds to small publishers and to help alleviate news deserts.
“Just in the last 20 years, we’ve already had one in four news outlets in Oregon close. I see this as an issue of democracy,” Pham said. “So I wanted to take action to make sure that we could find ways to help sustain our local journalism.”
As she said in an April 9 public hearing: “When newsrooms close, Oregonians lose.”
The hearing received 67 letters supporting the bill, many from publishers and reporters across the state.
“I’ve been really heartened to see strong bipartisan support,” Pham said.
When it's a negotiated settlement, you lose your leverage to make sure that the Big Tech companies are paying the fair market value for the content they are profiting from.
Khanh Pham, Oregon State Senator
However, the public hearing also received nine letters of opposition, primarily from tech companies. All but three of those letters expressed concerns that tech companies may respond similarly to how they did when Canada and Australia passed comparable legislation.
“In Canada, Meta made the business decision to end the availability of news rather than be forced to pay for links that we do not choose to post on Facebook and Instagram,” Dan Sachs, Meta’s senior national director of state and local policy, wrote in a letter to Oregon’s legislature.
He predicted that Meta will do the same if Oregon SB686 passes. Sachs argued that users voluntarily publish content, and such news posts are not the reason most users view Facebook and Instagram.
William Floyd, Google’s senior director of government affairs and public policy, joined in opposition. Taking a more cautionary approach, Floyd said the bill may benefit out-of-state publishers and violate the First Amendment.
Pham and Liias said they remain undeterred. “Ultimately, their business model depends on news content, so I am not convinced that [Google] would actually pursue a strategy that would so severely hurt their product,” Pham said.
Pearce of Rebuild Local News is less confident that Google and/or Meta won’t act on such threats because they essentially function as monopolies. Within the past year, two federal rulings declared Google an illegal monopoly, including one in April that found that the company violates U.S. antitrust laws due to its control of online advertising markets.
“When you’re a monopoly, you can actually degrade your product, and people will still keep using it because there’s not enough competition for you to be scared of people going somewhere else if you make your product worse,” Pearce said.
Asked why she did not ward off such possible retaliation by pursuing a negotiated settlement with Big Tech platforms, as California did, Pham said, “When it’s a negotiated settlement, you lose your leverage to make sure that the Big Tech companies are paying the fair market value for the content they are profiting from.”
Weighing other options
Illinois State Sen. Steve Stadelman, who previously said he was keeping an eye on the progression of California’s deal with Google before pushing forward an Illinois bill, said he understands why California chose to pursue a settlement with a single Big Tech entity to create a quick revenue stream. Stadelman refiled the Illinois Journalism Preservation Act in January. The bill, initially filed in February 2024 and held in the Senate for the 2024 session, would require Big Tech companies to compensate news organizations for news content used on their platforms. The refiled version of this bill is currently being held in the Senate as Stadelman determines the best way to proceed.
“I just want to make sure we have a good proposal moving forward, and I think those discussions are continuing,” Stadelman said. “So at this point I’ve not moved anything more legislatively than introducing the bill again, but discussions will continue. I’m trying to find a way to work with other states and see if we can find a common path or commonality and maybe increase our leverage.”
Hawaii’s tax bill, which calls for a tax on ad revenues collected by social media platforms from Hawaii-based news content, remains in a similar position.
Pearce said the Hawaii bill’s sponsor “straight-up told me that he wasn’t expecting the bill to move anywhere this session. It was more of a messaging bill to sort of send out the signal that he’s interested in this subject.”
New York State’s bargaining code bill S4401 is in the Senate Committee. However, the Rebuild Local News website reads, “S4401 is not locally focused and lacks journalist employment, labor spending and transparency requirements of its sibling bills in California, Illinois and Oregon.”
For now, the bills in Oregon and Washington appear to have the most momentum.
“It’s kind of interesting that you have these two active bills happening in Washington and Oregon because they’re extremely different models that kind of do the same thing, which is to say Big Tech has a responsibility to give back some money to the journalism industry,” Pearce said.
Article image by Nathana Rebouças used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
