Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least 10% of that money each year to local news organizations.
News organizations want ten percent of FB and Goog's advertising revenue? I guess I do too but this concept is facially absurd.
I can see why moving money from Facebook to local news media would benefit Australia, and let’s not pretend we can’t force Google or Facebook to comply. Just look at what they are willing to do for China.
It would seem better to just charge a 10% tax on advertising, put that in the general fund, and then subsidise newspapers however you see fit, which may or may not amount to the same AUD but can more easily change over time.
... What are they willing to do? Aren't they both banned in China?
This other country had a tax rule that was intended to help news media, and one of the ministries had to decide what "news media" meant, in effect set terms for who benefited.
This went well for a decade or more. Then, someone in that ministry wrote a memo that said (abbreviated and modernised): "Last week, <name> published a% clickbait, b% celebrity blahblah and other rubbish, and only c% factual news. We need to consider whether it is a news medium as required for the tax rule."
I have a feeling that the Austrialian companies that want a part of Googles/Facebook's income do not want any sort of just or equal tax rule, and also do absolutely not want to be restricted to publishing mostly news.
Protecting Chinese social media companies from competition is at best a secondary motivation and it probably isn't even necessary -- Chinese internet users prefer Chinese social media for a variety of reasons, and I don't think Facebook is a significant competitive threat. Neither is Twitter.
On the other hand, China allowed Google to operate even though it might have been a strong competitor to Baidu. Google was only blocked when it refused to comply with censorship policies -- again demonstrating that control over information is the government's main concern.
And you don't think that's absurd?
FYI I work on catching image thieves in the US and we sadly see lots of cases where you feel that it should clearly be illegal that a company is using someone else's photo without permission, but oddly enough it turns out to be not legally pursuable.
Because let's be honest, most people only look at the image and read the headline. So for them, the preview on facebook is "good enough".