TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - President Joko Widodo signed a presidential regulation (Perpres) on publisher rights. Jokowi said that the initial spirit of Perpres No.32/2024, was the desire to achieve quality journalism. The president made the announcement in Ancol today, Feb. 20, when attending the National Press Day celebration.

"We also want to ensure the sustainability of the national media industry. We want fairer cooperation between press companies and digital platforms," Jokowi said in his address.

The president emphasized that the regulation was in no way intended to reduce press freedom and that the desire for the existence of publisher rights came as an initiative from members of the press.

The government, Jokowi said, is not trying to regulate journalistic content, but instead regulate the business relationships between press companies and digital platforms, in the spirit of improving quality journalism.

"In the implementation of this presidential regulation, we still have to anticipate the potential risks, especially during the transition period of its implementation, both in terms of how digital platforms respond as well as the response from communities that use the services," Jokowi said.

As quoted from the Indonesian Press Council website, there are three main points in the Presidential Regulation Publisher Rights. The first is to codify existing cooperation practices. The second is to encourage interaction between digital platforms and press companies in a more balanced manner. And the third is to provide opportunities for press companies regardless of their business scale to increase cooperation with digital platforms.

Pay for Clicks; Challenge from Google

This regulation will implement a designation clause as stipulated in the Media Bargaining Code in Australia, wherein platforms such as Google are required to pay publishers for each news link that internet users click on from the Google search engine. Several other proposed clauses have also caused polemics.

Google Indonesia issued its response to the Presidential Regulation on July 25 last year, when the bill was still in the draft stage. Google threatened to stop displaying news content on its platform if the pay-for-click clause was implemented. Google did a similar thing in Australia and Canada.

If Google does that, then the Google search engine platform will stop showing content from media publishers in Indonesia. In addition to losing traffic, media publishers may lose billions of rupiah in income. But on the opposite end, Google will also face the potential of losing visitors due to a lack of content as a result of the absence of media publishers in its search engine.

Daniel A. Fajri

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