Australia passes law to make Google and Facebook pay for news stories
Australia passed a law on Thursday that forces Google and Facebook to pay local media for content published on their platforms, a pioneering piece of legislation that could serve as a reference for other countries to promote similar measures.
The law "will ensure media receive fair remuneration for the content they generate, which will help keep journalism of public interest in Australia," Australian Treasury Minister Josh Frydenberg said in a statement.
Ahead of passage, the government tabled a series of technical amendments to its proposed law on Tuesday, on the same day that Facebook and the executive announced the restoration of access to Australian news, which was blocked by the social network as a pressure measure, in the coming days.
The payments for news content bill was drafted following investigations by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) into the imbalance in advertising revenue between technology and advertising media in Australia.
ACCC found in its final report on digital platforms, published in December 2019, that they accounted for 51% of advertising spending in 2017 in the Oceanic country.
The new legislation in Australia - one of the democracies with the highest concentration of media ownership and where Rupert Murdoch's News Group has a strong presence - obliges technology companies to negotiate with the media, a consideration for journalistic content published on their platforms.
But the amendments give the technology companies more room for negotiation in their agreements with the media, given that they will be able to select their suppliers and are not obliged to sign a forced agreement if they have already signed previous agreements.
On the other hand, the law considers as a last resort the intervention of an arbitration panel, whose decision is binding to set the amount to be paid if there is no commercial agreement between the parties, one of the most important aspects of the proposal.
The inclusion of the amendments to the law after Google threatened to suspend its search services in the country and Facebook discontinued its news publishing service (yet to be reinstated) leads some analysts to suspect that the law will not be enforced.
"The code will remain on the statute books, unused. Nobody will be designated," noted legal scholar Michael Bradley on Wednesday in an op-ed in the political magazine Crickey, noting that the platforms and the big media groups will quickly reach their agreements.
Google has already this year signed deals with major media companies to feed its news feed, while Facebook in Australia signed its first letter of intent with Seven West Media, owners of Channel 7, to provide it with journalistic content, raising fears that smaller, independent organisations will be left out in the cold.
Bradley warned that the tech money would end up in the hands of the big media groups with "no obligation to spend it on the supposed object of all this fuss, actual journalism. The middle man — the government — will be cut out," he added.
The law was created in the wake of the media crisis caused by falling advertising revenues over the past two decades, which has led to massive newsroom layoffs, cuts in research spending and a move from print to digital to reduce costs.
Last year, the chairman of Australia's Nine media group, Peter Costello, said that Google and Facebook generate advertising revenues of about AUD 6 billion (USD 3.859 billion or EUR 3.571 billion) and about 10 per cent of that is the result of news content.
But for Amanda Lotz, professor of media studies at Queensland University of Technology, the main problem is that funding journalism through advertising is no longer viable because advertisers have little interest in the quality of news.
Lotz insisted in a recent article in The Conversation that alternative ways must be found to fund public interest journalism and non-profit news organisations.