An Oregon bill that would require big tech companies including Meta and Google to pay money to local newsrooms is trudging forward with less than three weeks left in this year’s legislative session. The proposed policy, Senate Bill 686, has undergone significant changes to address legal concerns from some lawmakers and tech companies, which have fought the proposal for months. But it’s unclear if those changes will convince enough lawmakers in both chambers to approve the bill. The intent of the proposed bill remains the same : to require massive tech companies that profit from the use of news content on their online platforms to pay a share of their profits to Oregon journalists who produce that content. Proponents of the bill, including dozens of Oregon publishers, have said it would provide a significant financial boost to a news industry that has been shrinking for years. Critics of the bill, including tech industry groups, have said the proposal would prompt Facebook and perhaps other companies to restrict news on their platforms, hurting publishers who use those platforms to promote their journalism and users who find news content on those websites.

On Wednesday, the Senate Rules Committee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance the bill to a full Senate vote. Its members did so after the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Khanh Pham, D-Portland, revised the proposed policy to address various legal concerns flagged by the Legislature’s nonpartisan team of lawyers. Leading up to the vote, those attorneys said several of their most substantial concerns have now been fixed. Still, they said this type of complicated policy is relatively untested and could face a successful legal challenge if passed. Democratic lawmakers who voted to advance the bill said they were pleased to see a more carefully-vetted proposal move forward. They said the possibility of a legal challenge was not enough to deter them from passing the policy. “It seems to me almost impossible to make a significant policy change, where huge sums of money are involved, without court challenges,” said Sen. Jeff Golden, an Ashland Democrat. If lawmakers always avoided passing bills because of potential legal battles, he said, “we probably wouldn’t pass legislation of any substance.” Republicans, meanwhile, said they remain concerned about any potential court challenges. Senate Republican Leader Daniel Bonham of The Dalles said he is also concerned that tech companies will retaliate in response to the bill, hurting local, independent publishers. “I still do have concerns,” Bonham said Wednesday. “With legal questions still on our minds, are we passing this bill hoping that it goes to the courts, and we’re using this bill to test the courts? That’s what it feels like to me, and I don’t support that.”

The latest version of the bill would incentivize large tech companies to sign agreements with Oregon news publishers in order for them to access, aggregate, or distribute news content on their platforms. Under those agreements, companies would agree to pay individual publishers a certain amount of money for profiting off of their news content. Instead of entering those agreements, tech companies could choose to pay all Oregon news publishers a collective annual sum for two years that would be divvied out to newsrooms that generate local news content. That provision would require companies of Google’s magnitude to pay $104 million annually and companies of Meta’s size to pay $18 million. The majority of the revenue from these payments would go to online news organizations that produce content for an Oregon audience and would be allocated based on the number of journalists they employ. Publishers would be required to spend most of that money on journalists’ salaries. Another 10% of revenue would go to a newly-established consortium hosted at the University of Oregon that would fund grants to local publishers and news startups, particularly in rural areas. The consortium would also support new journalism jobs and fund media training programs. Tech companies could also choose not to pay publishers at all. They could opt to restrict news content on their platforms, as Meta has previously threatened to do, or could continue monetizing news content without any agreements and face the possibility of lengthy legal battles and steep fines.

An earlier version of the bill likely would have violated several provisions in the Oregon Constitution, including a clause that prohibits the state from taking private property for public use. The latest version of the bill provides more leeway for tech companies to enter agreements with publishers and allows due process to challenge any arbitration rulings that determine the amount they owe. Although 17 Democratic lawmakers and one Republican have endorsed or testified in support of the proposal, it’s unclear if it has momentum to pass the full Senate and House in the coming weeks. The legislative session’s constitutionally-mandated deadline is June 29.

Editor’s note: John Maher, president and publisher of The Oregonian/OregonLive, testified in support of Senate Bill 686. The Oregonian/OregonLive is a member of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, which supports the bill. — Carlos Fuentes covers state politics and government. Reach him at 503-221-5386 or [email protected] . Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com/subscribe .