Report from AP News
In Brief – After more than a year of talk, Australia has unveiled draft legislation to require Meta, Google and TikTok to pay a 2.25% tax on Australian revenue if they decline to negotiate agreements to pay Australian media companies for news content. The News Bargaining Incentive is intended to incentivize the companies to participate in the News Media Bargaining Code that was enacted in 2021 and led Google and Meta to pay hundreds of millions to media companies in recent years. Meta, however, has declined to renew the Australian payments agreements, arguing that media companies freely post their content on Facebook and Instagram because they gain great value from widespread distribution, and that they will block news on the platforms rather than be compelled to pay for content posted by others. The government estimates that the new tax would generate 200–250 million Australian dollars annually and says the funds will be distributed to domestic news outlets based on journalist employment levels. Meta called the proposal a misguided “digital services tax” and Google argued the proposal fails to reflect changes in the advertising market and unfairly excludes companies like Microsoft, OpenAI and Snap.
Context – Media companies have been aggressively lobbying their domestic governments for nearly a decade to force digital ads giants Google and Meta to pay them when their content appears on the platforms. Australia, France, Spain and Canada were especially responsive. The biggest change in the standoff in recent years occurred when Canada enacted its law in 2023 and Google and Meta went separate ways. Google again agreed to pay up. Meta refused and chose instead to block news uploads in Canada. Meta brought that policy to Australia, leading the government to first float a tax proposal in late 2024. In recent years, online publishers have become very worried about AI upending the online ecosystem, and in Australia there have been calls to bring AI chatbots into the media payments regime. Ironically, both Google and Meta are exploring truly voluntary business deals to pay some online publishers for content used in their chatbot answers.