The Australian government plans to introduce a levy on social media companies and search engines to force them to pay publishers for journalism after Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, walked away from an existing arrangement.
In the proposed amendments to current regulations, any social media platform or search engine that derives more than $250mn in revenues a year from Australia would be subject to a “charge”. That levy would be offset against any payments made directly by tech companies to publishers. The move is intended to encourage them to negotiate with the media industry over commercial deals.
It is the latest move by Canberra to tackle the tech sector’s power after introducing a law last month that would ban anyone under 16 from using social media services. It also took X to court this year in an attempt to block violent videos being carried on its platform and has proposed laws on online scams and misinformation in the past year.
Meta and Google struck deals in 2021 to pay Australian media companies, including News Corp, Nine Entertainment’s newspaper arm Fairfax and a host of smaller media companies, more than A$200mn (US$128mn) a year for use of their content. That followed the introduction of world-first legislation to force tech companies to negotiate with publishers.
Those funds supported the creation of reporting jobs including apprentices, specialist roles and some journalists in rural areas, where local newspapers have struggled to deal with the digital transition.
Meta said this year it would stop paying media companies as part of a retreat from news feeds globally. That triggered a furious reaction from the Australian government, which pledged to force the company back to the negotiating table and to close “loopholes” in the law.
The new measure will be subject to a public consultation next year before details are confirmed. The amended law could have implications for Big Tech names in social media and search including Apple, TikTok, Meta, Microsoft’s LinkedIn and Google. The latter signed a new deal with publishers in July.
Meta said the new law did not reflect how people use social media.
“We agree with the government that the current law is flawed and continue to have concerns about charging one industry to subsidise another,” it said. “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.”
TikTok and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news was welcomed by the country’s largest media companies. Michael Miller, executive chair of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, said the Australian government had shown it was “prepared to be a leader” in setting out how tech companies should operate in society.
“This will provide a foundation for rebuilding the media industry after the loss of an estimated 1,000 jobs this year, and ensuring Australian news media businesses will continue to deliver inquiring and professional journalism, which has never been more important to cohesive, democratic societies,” said Miller.
He said his company would look to immediately open talks with Meta and TikTok over a commercial deal.
Matt Stanton, acting chief executive of Nine, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, told the 2GB radio station that strengthening the law provided tech companies with an “incentive” to strike commercial deals. “There’s a bit of carrot and stick here,” he said.
He rejected the notion that it meant tech companies would in effect subsidise media companies, saying the reverse was true. “Australian eyeballs go to these platforms [for our content] and they are monetising that,” he said.
The Australian Taxation Office would be in charge of collecting the levy, but the government said it did not intend to raise revenues through the process, with any charges collected passed on to the media sector.
