In a world first, Australia plans to force Facebook and Google to pay for news (but ABC and SBS miss out)
Rob Nicholls breaks down what the ACCC’s draft bargaining code means for publishers and the tech giants, in this crossposting from The Conversation.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released its draft news media bargaining code, announced by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.
Frydenberg said the code will attempt to “level the playing field”
The draft code allows commercial news businesses to bargain – individually or collectively – with Google and Facebook, in order to be paid for news the tech giants publish on their services.
According to ACCC chair Rod Sims, the code aims to address the bargaining power imbalance between news publishers and major digital platforms, to bring about fair payment for news. As Frydenberg said:
So the two primary sources of journalistic reporting on their news bulletins – the ABC and SBS – are not allowed to bargain for remuneration.
Anyone with a scintilla of foresight would see that the ABC and SBS having their work also fairly remunerated would go a long way to resolve the funding gap under the budget freeze.
Conclusion – that this government will seize any opportunity to minimise their funding.
This unworkable clusterfail has disaster written all over it. News and Nine bargaining on behalf of all Australian publishers? These dinosaurs are in the position they’re in from their total ignorance of modern publishing. And yet the government and ACCC are sucking up to them. This is going to break many publishers… especially the smaller ones… which is supposedly the point.
According to https://www.accc.gov.au/about-us/australian-competition-consumer-commission/legislation “The Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (CCA) covers most areas of the market: the relationships between suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers. Its purpose is to enhance the welfare of Australians by promoting fair trading and competition, and through the provision of consumer protections.”
There has never been a question of plagiarism or breach of copyright. If it was, why would that not be the correct remedy? Since this measure is all about the loss of advertising revenue to a superior medium, how does the policy meet the objective of CCA? High Court challenge possibly?
Goobook are both going to just shut down the AU news services. Then what? It’ll impact most independent news orgs… The winners are news and nine.
They have won, this insider political influence is so obvious. It’s a sad day for journalists and it’s very unlike the LNP to not want money back for gov funded ABC and SBS. It seems like the commercial pub influence is even stronger than we thought.
Tech will ultimately prevail but this will go down in history as on of the strongest forms of neo liberal media influence in politics against foreign companies with superior products and services.
Just watch, Google will pull Google News in Australia like it did it in Spain, leading to less visible Australian news content.