Source : THE AGE NEWS
Publishing giant News Corporation has attacked the federal government’s late changes to its plan to make tech giants pay for journalism, warning the revised design lets tech platforms off the hook just as the rules were meant to tighten.
The blunt criticism from News Corp came as other publishers, including the owner of this masthead, Nine, were more measured in commenting on the changes, with Nine saying it was important the policy still met its purpose.
The government is trying to ensure the sustainability of Australia’s media sector through the News Bargaining Incentive, a policy aimed at pushing tech giants to strike commercial deals with publishers.
The government on Monday confirmed tweaks to the policy, including narrowing the charge from the total Australian revenue of large tech platforms to their digital advertising revenue alone.
To make up the difference, Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino said the rate that tech giants would need to pay if they do not strike deals with publishers would rise from 2.25 per cent to 2.5 per cent of the tech giant’s digital advertising revenue.
Platforms must also now strike deals with at least six publishers, up from the four proposed in April, and the carve-out for professional networking services such as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is gone.
The incentive is the government’s answer to the failure of the 2021 news media bargaining code, which was meant to force Meta and Google to pay Australian publishers for the journalism circulating on their platforms. While Google signed deals, Meta walked away in 2024, and the code lacked the mechanisms to stop it.
Publishers have long argued that tech giants pilfer the premium news content that is crucial to the success and user engagement of their networks. Tech companies, however, counter that publishers voluntarily share their articles to reap the commercial benefits of massive referral traffic, and argue that news actually makes up only a tiny fraction of what their users want to see.
Nine Entertainment chief executive Matt Stanton said foreign-owned tech companies had a significant and growing influence over how Australians reached local journalism.
“These significant changes, made late in this process, require closer scrutiny to ensure it continues to meet its fundamental purpose: compelling these platforms to negotiate fairly for the journalism they benefit from,” he said.
News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller went further, saying the changes “gut the incentive for tech platforms to strike fair deals with Australian media, right when those rules need strengthening, not softening”.
“Tech giants cannot keep dodging their obligations. Australia deserves full revenue transparency, backed by severe, non-negotiable penalties for any platform that flouts local law,” he said.
Mulino rejected the criticism, saying the money reaching media companies was unchanged. Fair commercial deals would deliver $200 million to $250 million a year, he said, while platforms that refused to negotiate would pay $350 million to $400 million to the government.
“In the arrangements that we inherited there were few repercussions, if any, if big tech platforms walked away from news media organisations,” Mulino said. “Now, they will end up paying substantially more than if they enter into commercial agreements.”
Rod Sims, the former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair who designed the original news media bargaining code, welcomed LinkedIn’s inclusion, but he did not follow the government’s arithmetic. The original code raised about $250 million five years ago, he said. The new scheme captures TikTok and LinkedIn on top of Meta and Google, yet the government is forecasting no more money than before.
Sims also questioned how the charge treats Google’s search revenue as users migrate to Gemini summaries, saying it was not clear the interaction had been thought through.
Mulino said the government had “consciously separated” AI from the incentive because a separate policy process looking at AI and copyright, led by the attorney-general.
“What we’re looking at here is dealing with a situation where big tech platforms share news in its existing form,” he said. “There’s a separate process which is looking at the ways in which AI might manipulate or use the content of news to produce something new.”
Independent publisher Man of Many, which in January was stripped from the government’s register of news businesses eligible under the scheme, said the changes improved the scheme but would reach almost none of the industry. Outlets that are not on the government’s register do not receive funding under the incentive.
Co-founder Scott Purcell praised the grants program for the smallest publishers and the doubling of the loading for regional and diverse-community journalism. He said however that fewer than 100 businesses sit on ACMA’s register, while the same regulator’s media diversity framework counts 2864 professional news outlets.
Australia accounts for about 2 per cent of global digital advertising, he said, and no platform will trade a global precedent for a discount in one mid-sized market.
Opposition communications spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the narrower revenue base amounted to a “free kick” for the platforms at the expense of Australian news outlets, and would leave billions of dollars in tech giant revenue outside the scheme.
“Labor’s dithering and delay on a promised replacement scheme has left tech giants unaccountable,” Henderson said, adding that Communications Minister Anika Wells was not tough enough to put Australian media companies first.
Opposition assistant treasury spokesman Kevin Hogan said the scheme would only work if platforms accurately reported their Australian revenues, and the Coalition was “yet to understand how this will work in practice”.
Meta, Google and TikTok declined to comment, while Microsoft and LinkedIn did not respond to requests for comment. Google has previously said it is the only tech company in Australia with commercial agreements supporting more than 90 news businesses. Meta abandoned its code-era deals in 2024 and has called the incentive a discriminatory tax, and it retains the option it has already used twice: stripping news from Facebook and Instagram, as it did in Canada in 2023 and briefly in Australia in 2021.
The bill is expected in parliament early in the spring sittings.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
