Summary
Australia proposed new rules requiring tech giants like Meta, Google, and TikTok to pay Australian media outlets for news content on their platforms.
Starting January 2025, companies earning over AU$250 million annually in Australia must either negotiate agreements with publishers or face taxes.
The policy aims to support journalism and ensure media organizations receive fair compensation.
Critics like Meta argue the rules misunderstand platform dynamics, as most users don’t visit for news.
This follows Australia’s broader efforts to regulate big tech, including bans on underage social media use and penalties for disinformation.
In Canada, on Facebook there is no more news media, all the news TV channels or al the traditional media press etc are gone, you cannot even share news articles on Messenger, or if someone elsewhere in the world post one, your feed or messenger says that you cannot see it.
Unfortunately what is remaining in facebook feed are all pseudo news, far right, fake news, racist, etc because they are not in the “news media” category so are free to post/share what they want.
I’m guessing that means search engines won’t include news results in Australia then?
Until they reach an agreement like in Canada.
What sort of agreement was that? I can’t imagine they’d pay very much, because making Google search good is not very important to Google.
“We’ve created a fixed pool, or a fund model, that’s going to now be distributed centrally by one bargaining unit, in proportion to the number of journalists that the members have. Which is what we thought this should be and what Google and Meta thought this should be all along,” he said.
Looks like 100M collectively? I’m not clear if this is for search or YouTube, but if search, I didn’t know they valued it’s quality so much.
