Report from The Guardian
In Brief – Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest diversified media company with television, radio, print and digital platforms, is urging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to fast-track legislation reinforcing Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and expanding it to cover the largest AI chatbot services. CEO Matt Stanton says that AI and global tech platforms continue to erode publishers’ revenues. As many of the original media payments agreements made by Google and Meta after the initial legislation was enacted in 2021 expire, and Meta indicates that it does not plan to negotiate new deals, legislative discussions have centered on strengthening the current “voluntary” code by allowing the government to impose a charge, effectively a new tax, on covered digital platforms that fail to negotiate meaningful payment agreements with media companies. The government-imposed platform fee could be offset if a large platform strikes qualifying deals with publishers. While ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has been expected to be pulled in the reformed media payments regime, publishers have grown very concerned that “zero-click searches” and AI-generated answers will reduce traffic to news sites and the related advertising revenues, increasing calls to bring the largest AI chatbot providers into the system as well.
Context – Media companies have been appealing to governments for nearly a decade to force Google and Meta to pay them when their content appears on the platforms. Australia, France, Spain and Canada were especially responsive. When Canada enacted its version of a forced media payments regime in 2023, Google and Meta diverged in their approach. While Google paid up, Meta refused, choosing instead to block news uploads to their platforms. Meta’s decision to stop paying for media content led to the Australian government’s tax proposal being floated in late 2024. Lately, media company digital concerns globally seem more focused on AI upending the online ecosystem. In that context, both Google and Meta are exploring truly voluntary business deals paying some publishers for content used in their chatbot answers.