The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has filed a complaint with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) because the Apple and Google news services aren’t naming the British public service broadcaster as notably as it would like.
The complaint suggests that Apple News and Google News minimize credit for the news that the BBC features on their platforms.
This is very important to the British broadcaster because it gets its budget from a so-called license fee model. The BBC partially depends on global brand recognition for its funding. It also makes money from outside licensing and advertising. However, UK license fees account for 68 percent of the BBC’s total annual income. That’s why the broadcaster wants its work to be visible to and valued by its target audience.
According to AppleInsider, the broadcaster believes it isn’t getting the credit it deserves. Therefore, it wants more recognition for all the online news featured in news and podcast apps provided by Apple and Google.
“If audiences derive value from our content and services but attribute that value to gatekeepers instead of the BBC, then that undermines the perceived value of the BBC,” the British broadcaster says in a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
In addition, the BBC accuses Apple and Google of downplaying where they get their news, weakening the relationship between the corporation and the British population that finds it.
Therefore, the BBC is asking the CMA to impose rules on tech companies that give more prominence to the sources they quote. For example, by showing the logos of the sources they aggregate in their services.
Apple has already gotten into trouble with the BBC when it used its own AI engine to summarize news stories from the United Kingdom. News results were often distorted or fabricated, or missing the point. The broadcaster complained that the summaries were hurting the company’s reputation.
Apple decided to disable the news summarization feature by default.
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