Australia to Force Tech Companies to Keep Paying for News

A pedestrian walks in front of the Meta logo at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2021. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Australia will charge big tech companies if they do not pay Australian media companies for news hosted on their platforms.

“The news bargaining initiative will ... create a financial incentive for agreement-making between digital platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones said at a press conference on Dec. 12.

In 2021, Australia passed the News Media Bargaining Code, a law to ensure that “news media businesses are fairly remunerated for the content they generate, helping to sustain public interest journalism in Australia.”

Jones said that the platforms at risk will be significant social media and search engines with an Australian-based revenue in excess of $250 million.

‘Fails to Account for the Realities’

Tech companies have condemned the plan.

“The proposal fails to account for the realities of how our platforms work, specifically that most people don’t come to our platforms for news content and that news publishers voluntarily choose to post content on our platforms because they receive value from doing so,” a Meta spokesman said after Jones’s remarks.

A spokesperson for Google said the government’s decision “risks ongoing viability of commercial deals with news publishers in Australia.”

Australian lawmakers say the code helps news businesses.

“It is reasonable to conclude that the Code has been a success,” the Treasury said in a report in December 2022, which noted that Google and Facebook owner Meta had “over 30 agreements with a broad range of news businesses.”

“At least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations.”

After the move, Meta—which owns Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—briefly blocked users from reposting news articles but later struck deals with several Australian media companies, such as News Corp and national broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corp.

It has since said that it will not renew those arrangements beyond 2024.

In February, Meta said it would discontinue the news tab on Facebook in Australia and the United States, adding that it had canceled the tab last year in Britain, France, and Germany.

New Zealand

A similar law is being mulled in New Zealand. However, in October, Google said that it would simply stop linking to countries’ news articles if the government tried to force it to pay for content.

Caroline Rainsford, Google New Zealand’s country director, said in a blog post at the time, “We’d be forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers.”

Last year, Google said it would block Canadian news on its platform after the government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau passed Bill C-18, or the Online News Act.

At the time, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said in a blog post that the law was “unworkable.”

Google eventually reached a deal, agreeing to pay CA$100 million ($73.6 million) annually to news publishers in the country.

Ban Under 16s

Last month, the Australian House of Representatives passed a bill to ban people younger than 16 from social media platforms.

Should the legislation pass through the nation’s Senate, it will become the first law of its kind anywhere in the world.

All the major parties backed the bill, which would make social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X, and Instagram liable for fines of up to AU$50 million ($33 million) for allowing children to hold accounts.

Companies affected by the ban had asked for the vote to be delayed until at least June next year, but their requests were rejected.

X owner Elon Musk said that the government in the capital of Canberra intends to go further with its plans for restricting the internet.

He said in a post earlier this month that the move seems “like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians.”

Guy Birchall and Reuters contributed to this report.