Australia passes law levying tech giants that fail to pay for local news
Australia passes law to levy tech giants that fail to pay for local news
Australia passed legislation on Thursday imposing a 2.5% levy on tech giants' local advertising revenue unless they strike commercial deals with news outlets. The News Bargaining Incentive applies to Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn, covering companies with significant social media or search services and local ad revenue exceeding A$250 million. Platforms can avoid the charge by reaching agreements with at least eight publishers, with offsets for spending.
The legislation is here, and the message to platforms to pursue commercial deals is clear.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.