Newspapers don’t need a special law to help compete with Google and Facebook

The newspaper industry has crawled up Capitol Hill once again to beg for an antitrust exemption it thinks it needs in its fight with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan cheered the bill last week and other newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, and others) have editorialized in favor of the exemption. One measure of how lucrative online classified ads became for the newspaper industry could be seen when the Graham family sold the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in 2013.

Source: www.politico.com