Australia passes law to levy tech giants that fail to pay for local news | Hacker News Reader

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

reuters.com

54 pointsthm53 comments

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.

Correct, I remember my dad complaining he can't share Toronto Star articles on Facebook because they block you from posting them. Same with Instagram.

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2024/05/the-behind-the-scenes-bi...

The article doesn't link to the text of the law, but from what the article says the law will make it mandatory for Facebook to enter into agreements with news outlets, whether they want to or not (otherwise they'll be ""fined"" millions of AUD)

That is what the Canadian law said. This was "if Meta is showing news content".

Contrary to the law's assumption, news is worth hardly anything to Meta, so they just stopped showing it.

Does the Australian law really say:

1. You must show news, even if you don't want to

2. You must pay to do so

3. The rate will be determined by negotiation with the people you are paying

4. You cannot say no to them in aggregate

I have my doubts, but if it does I still doubt it will get the results the govt wants. The problem is news is not valuable to Meta.

The Australian government has probably learned from the Canadians and set the law up so the tax is more successful. Recall that the government has the power to levy unfair taxes and handouts in principle, so it doesn't matter all that much that their claimed reasoning is silly. This looks to be equivalent to a social media tax and an Australian news handout, just bundled together for rhetorical purposes (and with a bizarre negotiating element in a welfare transfer that really just looks like beating around the bush to me).

Yeah, the way it's being discussed, it does seem like the law is trying to impose those four restrictions. But that seems like compelled speech...I know too little about Australian law, but that seems like a bad precedent, in the sense that government is now forcing private entities to publish news from sites they specify and pay for the privilege. It's not quite state media, but it adjacent to it.

The incentives are horrible. Piss off the government and you won't be included in the pool of sites that are eligible for shakedown money. Piss off Google / Meta and they will throw you out in the cold and make a deal with another site in the pool.

Seems like a recipe for massive US tariffs . We will see exactly what all the bribes and sucking up gets big tech.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion on this platform but I think the US should protect companies domiciled in the US from what amount to a shakedown by foreign governments. Legal protection and representation play a big role in where a company chooses to domicile. That's partly what the taxes are for. It's mostly US stockholders that own these companies. So they're really just screwing over people w Meta in their 401k and pension funds (many of which are public).

Agreed in principle although I'd say screwing over is strong as this will end up as just a cost of doing business in Australia rather than lead to losses.

Every economy should get value for its resources - no country is obligated to sell things unreasonably cheaply - people's time & attention included.

Meta pays an effective federal tax rate of like 3.5%

We owe them nothing

If it's mandatory to enter into agreements, those aren't agreements, they're mandates.

Hard to call it an "agreement" at that point. I thought one of the fundamental rules of contract law is that it can't be signed under duress.

A sovereign nation is just that, sovereign. What it decides isn't an agreement.

You may not want to obey the posted speed limits or pay something the law demands, but that's not about a contract you sign or don't, it's a decision made by a sovereign nation.

Meta will have the option of not posting links to Australian media. But if it does post that, the law applies, and "agreement" is irrelevant.

Did you seriously believe that governments play fair? :-)

Canada copied Australia - we did it first in 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241232296

This is just an extension to 2021. The pigs have come back. They want more gravy.

>Newspapers get less traffic, can't use social media even if they wanted to

Newspapers want to sell subscriptions for their local area, on paper or on their WEB site. I would say getting clicks from non-subscribers has no value for them.

> I would say getting clicks from non-subscribers has no value for them.

So the newspaper gets no revenue when non-subscribers view (and perhaps click) ads on the newspaper's web site?

TIL, I guess...

What’s the top of the funnel for getting subscriptions?

Finding the right people. A small subset of the general audience.

Trying to get your word in front of all eyeballs in the hope of hitting the right ones at the right time is a hopeful strategy, not a well-considered one.

So the reality they must face is that the social media giants will try to circumvent regulation.

Fine. And the most reasonable response to that is therefore to implement some form of general anti-avoidance rule, of the sort that's used in, for example, tax, company, and employment law.

For instance, you could say that if a social media company were to change its behaviour to avoid a law of this sort then they should incur a charge equivalent to, say, 10% of its global revenue. That ought to make compliance with the law the more attractive option.

There's no reason to be defeatist about this - social media companies are not and should not be above the law.

The law says that they have to compensate the news organizations when links to those news articles are shared on their platform. They are completely in compliance with the law because they're preventing those links from being shared on the platform.

This is in no way circumventing regulation. It's following it, the same way Anthropic is following copyright law by shredding books after they scan them. They're just doing what the courts said.

What I don't get is when people make rules with a particular outcome in mind, but don't reason through the incentives the rule creates.

For what it's worth, I'm thrilled that you can't post news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. The fewer people that visit those platforms, the better!

You could imagine another approach:

A tax on any advertising appearing alongside text information (so not video or audio). And then a public service subsidy for local reporting.

Both could be totally technologically neutral.

> A tax on any advertising appearing alongside text information

Interesting. Are you imagining classified ads would be impacted? What does "alongside" mean, in this context?

It would be easy for Google, Facebook, and Instagram to remove ads on posts that carried news information. Having a tax on any ad alongside text might incentivize them to move to photos and video.

TikTok would lobby for this.

On news information?

> 10% of its global revenue

Yeah, there’s no chance that the response to such a law would be for them to immediately shut down all Australian operations, block all connections from Australia, immediately lay off every Australian citizen working for them, and essentially evacuate the country.

Damn, can you imagine a world where it would be so easy to convince one of these companies to stop poisoning the minds of an entire country like that?

Like, I kinda jest, but also kinda don’t. Would that really be so bad of an outcome? The net positives don’t really seem to bear up under all the negatives just… going away.

Yeah, but social media won’t be the only companies that notice. If Australia’s government will do it to them to prop up their local dying industry, they will do it to you, too. If the EU or US tries that, well, those are huge markets and maybe you bend (maybe you don’t!). But Australia is 27 million people, less than 10% the size of those. If they want to get heavy-handed, well, it’s their country, but as recent US actions have shown, other countries’ companies may pick up their ball and go home rather than play with you.

As an Aussie expat who uses Facebook to keep in contact with my friends and family: yes, it would be bad. Social networking tools have real positive effects on the world, let us not forget that.

This is not "circumventing regulation" here but nullifying the argument the newspapers had for bringing the law in the first place.

They argued that Meta needs them for exposure and that's why they should pay, apparently it's not true and they don't need them.

That is similar to saying someone who refrains from murdering random strangers is circumventing the law that would send them to prison if they did. Not triggering this sort of law is a totally acceptable response and there is no reason for anti-avoidance measures. The basic deal here is is if social media propagates the news then they must pay the news companies. Banning the news companies is reasonable. If they don't want to pay then they can disassociate from the news sites.

Frankly it would be a win for everyone. I don't know why anyone is reading Australian news media in the first place, the information density is low.

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.

They don't need tech companies to distribute their news; they have websites and apps that people can and do visit directly. It's just that people who actually want to read news is a minority, and they'd also like the eyeballs of doomscrollers.

> 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.

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.

The government already runs a 24/7 news station as well as 2 primetime news shows and accompanying websites, radio programs, etc. Why it needs to intervene to prop up the private news media is beyond me. But at least if the funding comes from 'agreements' with Google and FB it is a bit more at arm's reach from the government.

and when meta starts a local news station that just does what it did before it had a local news station?

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.

They would rather ban to deterr other governments from taking such measures.

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.

> 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.

The profit margin on ads for both Alphabet and Meta is around 50%, so this just a 5% tax on operating profit.

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

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?

There are only 2 serious private news orgs in the whole country (News Corp and Nine), so this won't be a problem.

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

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.

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

The kind of single-sided crap with no rigor, no verification, source "my ass" we get these days I feel like it was journalism that invented hallucinations on AI.

Every time I click an archive.ph link, democracy sheds a single tear.

Tech people often do work for free - the open source software movement is built on free labour.

Some tech people work on open source projects. Some journalists volunteer at homeless shelters. What's your point? Nether are their primary jobs.

The point is that just because you made something of value doesn't mean someone must pay you for it, and indeed modern tech is built on the non-compensated valuable labour of techies. Similarly just because you write an article doesn't mean you deserve to get paid for it, certainly not by extorting money from tech companies just because they outcompeted you at advertising.

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