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.
