Rupert Murdoch suggests Facebook pay carriage fees similar to the cable TV model to recognize trusted publishers
How to Stay Safe from Killer Robots? Stand In a Puddle Siladitya Ray / MediaNama : Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay publishers for their content Todd Spangler / Variety : Rupert Murdoch: Facebook Should Pay Publishers Just as Cable Operators Pay for TV John Battelle / NewCo Shift : Murdoch to Zuckerberg: Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Some Change? Mike Snider / USA Today : Rupert Murdoch: Facebook should pay media companies for news on social network Maya Kosoff / Vanity Fair : Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg: Shut Up, Pay Me BBC : Rupert Murdoch: Facebook should pay for news Mike Shields / Business Insider : Rupert Murdoch may be right that Facebook should pay media companies. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. Kieren McCarthy / The Register : Murdoch to Zuckerberg: Cough up cash, nerd John Johnson / Newser : Rupert Murdoch Is Not Pleased With Mark Zuckerberg TechCrunch : Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay for the news Hanna Kozlowska / Quartz : Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay publishers like cable companies Sara Fischer / Axios : Murdoch calls for radical change between Facebook and publishers Rob LeFebvre / Engadget : Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay ‘trusted’ publishers for content Steve Kovach / Business Insider : Rupert Murdoch: Facebook has become ‘inherently unreliable’ and should pay publishers for posting on the site Jason Abbruzzese / Mashable : Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay publishers, which is adorable Nick Statt / The Verge : Rupert Murdoch calls for Facebook and Google to subsidize the news business Tweets: Aron Pilhofer / @pilhofer : Like I said last before: Publishers vastly overestimate the value of their content to Facebook. This silly posturing doesn't help newspapers and does nothing but make the problem worse. http://newscorp.com/... Tony Haile / @arctictony : Cable companies generate zero value without the content companies they pay. FB depends on the total news industry for a max of 4% of their consumer value. Cable and the Platforms seem alike but have diametrically opposed characteristics Janko Roettgers / @jank0 : And carriage fees only work because networks have the upper hand in disputes. The same is not true at all in FB vs. publishers. Janko Roettgers / @jank0 : Let's take the business decisions that doomed the cable bundle and apply them to social media... Janko Roettgers / @jank0 : Okay, carriage fees haven't doomed the cable bundle, but they have definitely led to ballooning prices, which has helped to accelerate cord cutting. Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Wait a minute. @rupertmurdoch has sharp words for a big internet company? You don't say. http://newscorp.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : “The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services.” https://twitter.com/... Heidi N Moore / @moorehn : It's super-smart. Google should do this too. https://twitter.com/... Gabe Rivera / @gaberivera : Given News Corp's greatest hits in my Facebook feed have involved either Seth Rich or the WSJ Editorial Board, I agree Facebook should pay a high price before linking to any of this. https://twitter.com/... Jack Shafer / @jackshafer : Rupert Murdoch, who owns and runs the Fox News Channel, on “scurrilous news sources” and “trust.” Try not to laugh. http://newscorp.com/... Tim Peterson / @petersontee : This assumes that FB is going to tell pubs if they're a trusted news source (or otherwise publicly disclose who's trusted). But FB's not planning to do that http://www.businesswire.com/ ... Tom Gara / @tomgara : (Easy to dismiss this in any number of ways, but Murdoch & News Corp were *way* ahead of the curve in their approach to / war on the mega-platforms) http://twitter.com/... Aaron Nagler / @aaronnagler : “I want my cut.” Shorter Murdoch. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
When Rupert Murdoch framed platform distribution through the cable carriage model — operators pay for content they carry — it read as an owner's demand rather than an industry position. The related coverage shows the argument gaining institutional weight afterward: Zuckerberg publicly conceded that internet platforms have a responsibility to fund news partnerships, and Facebook began paying some news partners up to $3M a year for its news tab.
First-order effects
- Facebook moves from free-riding on publisher content to a negotiated-payment posture, with News Corp among the publishers positioned to extract per-carriage terms.
- Publishers gain a pricing template — carriage fees — that reframes their content as licensed inventory rather than unpaid referral traffic.
Second-order effects
- Google is pulled into the same bargaining frame, culminating in News Corp's multi-year global partnership with 'significant payments' — evidence the cable model migrated from Facebook to its largest rival.
- Regulators convert the private negotiation into policy: Australian and French authorities move to mandate tech-company payments to publishers, with leaders from Ireland to Malaysia signaling they will follow.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform-news economics structurally shifts from traffic-for-exposure barter to regulated licensing regimes — with Facebook's Australia news ban demonstrating that platforms will surrender money before surrendering control over how content appears.
- The precedent extends beyond news feeds into any surface where publisher content powers a platform's product, including AI systems trained on news content.
The trend: Publisher content is moving from freely scraped feed input to paid, increasingly regulator-mandated licensing across platforms.