Powering Up, a paper published by the Institute of Economic Affairs highlighting pitfalls in proposals for a new Digital Markets Unit, has been quoted in Press Gazette.

The article said:

“A recent report by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has said the UK’s Digital Markets Unit which looks set to force publishers and platforms to negotiate ‘risks stifling investment and innovation’, said publishers ‘appear to derive significant value from free traffic to their websites’ and that the ‘benefits they receive may well be greater than any reasonable valuation of the news snippets they provide to those platforms’.

“The IEA report said the £1bn claim ‘greatly overstate[s] the importance of news to digital platforms’ by wrongly extrapolating an Ofcom finding that Brits spend 6 per cent of their time online on news to say they spend 6 per cent of their time on Facebook with news content. It also pointed out that many news-related search engine and social posts are not advertised against, and therefore do not bring in revenue.”

Read the full article here.