Australia passes law to levy tech giants that fail to pay for local news

reaperducer

Journalists can work for free when tech people work for free.

mc32

Unfortunately for them, not publishing news will likely cost the giants less than the payments they'd have to make to keep the news. News writers are in a supplicant position. They need the tech giants to disseminate their news way more than the tech giants need them. By nature, it's a very asymmetrical relationship.

bko

Didn't Canada try this in 2023? > Online News Act (Bill C-18) in June 2023. The law was designed to make large digital platforms compensate Canadian news organizations when news content was made available through their services. It created a bargaining/arbitration framework rather than literally setting a per-link tax. > So beginning in August 2023, Meta blocked news on both Facebook and Instagram in Canada. Canadians could no longer view or share links/content from Canadian or foreign news organizations on those platforms... As of 2026, the Canadian government still describes Meta as blocking news sharing on Facebook and Instagram Pretty much the worst result for everyone. Newspapers get less traffic, can't use social media even if they wanted to. Inconvenience to users. Meta mostly unaffected, maybe some marginal loss in time spent on the platform. These kinds of things eventually just face reality. Meta and Google know very well how much these things are worth to them in terms of marginal revenue or network value. And the answer is not what publishers want to hear.

BLKNSLVR

It's amusing, in a shameful, 'typical government' rubbing all it's brain cells together to come up with the answer they were lobbied to come up with by the status quo of their era, way. Of all the things they could throw at the tech giants, they choose this? Fucking SMH (not Sydney Morning Herald in this case, although related). Dismantle the collection of data. Enforce advertising standards and rules. Either of those things would benefit humanity. This? This is Weekend At Bernie's; one last party with the corpse of a dead old man. Fucks sake. Dumb cunts will retire to their gold plated mansions in the middle of dystopia.

juancn

Won't this end up with news orgs that don't have deals just being delisted? It's probably great for the 3 or 4 largest ones, but the rest?

consensus1

The theory that these online platforms are stealing value from the news companies is thoroughly disproven by the fact that they would rather ban news from their platform than make the payments. This is a government shakedown and nothing more. If local news is worth funding publicly then it should be done properly out of a general tax on the public like other public programs.

pingou

They could create competing news organisations with the money, then I'm sure newspapers will abandon the push to tax them.

Humphrey

> 2.5% on their advertising revenues Does anybody know if that is enough for them to care? Surely they should be paying 30% tax on profit (not revenue above) regardless. Of cause I assume they use tax havens to avoid paying Australia tax.

arctic-true

It would be very difficult to enforce, but a mechanism to force scrapers to pay would probably be more effective than this. The social media sites can live without local news. Web search and LLM providers cannot live without new data and up-to-date information about the world.

testing22321

> Proceeds from the scheme would be directed to local Australian news outlets If this is anything like the last similar law Australia passed, this is SEVERELY glossing over the details. Because of size and criteria, only one “local Australian” news outlet got the money the Australian government collected. They were all owned by Rupert Murdoch. Oh yes, Australia has a current law whereby Facebook pay the government, and they give 100% of it directly to Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Utterly disgusting.

juiceland

Governments tax entities to pay for stuff all the time. Why is this agreement requirement in there? Just tax Meta and pay the local news stations.

mr_toad

They could have just bumped up GST for online advertising, but why take the simple approach when you can build Byzantine regulatory frameworks.