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While some news outlets have welcomed the interim recommendations of a committee calling for “alternative revenue mechanisms” to supplement the embattled News Media Bargaining Code, media experts have questioned how the proposal would come to fruition.
A Labor-majority joint select committee has recommended mechanisms to supplement the code, which could include a “digital platform levy”.
The code, introduced in 2021, forces tech companies who do not satisfactorily pass voluntary publishing deals with Australian media outlets to enter bargaining negotiations, by way of being “designated”.
The idea of a levy had been floated since July as an alternative to having to designate tech companies under the code, which many fear would trigger catastrophic outcomes for Australian consumers — either the blocking of news in Australia (as happened briefly in 2021, is currently happening in Canada, and is being threatened in New Zealand), or the complete withdrawal of platforms such as Facebook from the relatively small Australian market.
Tim Burrowes, owner of media industry newsletter Unmade, said it felt as though the government was soft-launching the proposal.
“Generally, the government’s played it really, really close, but it’s started sounding like [a levy] might just be a potential off-ramp that would avoid the confrontation [of designation],” Burrowes told Crikey.
“It’s almost this kind of stick or carrot, isn’t it? If we designate, is that actually what forces [Facebook owner] Meta’s hand to get out [of the Australian market]? Or do they just say, okay, step one is the digital levy, and we’ll see where that lands for everyone?”
Burrowes was sceptical of a number of the other recommendations in the committee’s report, including one proposal to “examine options to respond to the use of algorithms and recommender systems to deprecate news”.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland told a press conference at Parliament House on October 9 that the government had received its advice from the ACCC and Treasury and was considering whether to designate Meta under the code.
Among the 11 recommendations of the interim report is support for legislation “to combat mis- and disinformation”. Also included was a recommendation to establish a “Digital Affairs Ministry with overarching responsibility for the coordination of regulation to address the challenges and risks presented by digital platforms”.
The proposed new ministry “should be given a … broad remit so that it can regulate matters such as, but not limited to, privacy and consumer protection, competition, online safety and scams,” the report wrote.
Asked about the potential of a digital levy to push tech giants out of the Australian market, Billi FitzSimons, editor-in-chief of youth-focused news outlet The Daily Aus, told Crikey “at a broad level, TDA welcomes alternative models that address some of the shortcomings of the news bargaining code”.
Schwartz Media CEO Ben Shepherd said “urgent and decisive action hopefully is forthcoming” in relation to tests for registration of new businesses in the media space that would limit new companies to those “whose primary business is predicated on the constant creation and publication of legitimate public interest news and journalism”.
Shepherd told Crikey that Schwartz was “encouraged by the release of [the] interim report and government effort so far to resolve what is a significant challenge to the sustainability of legitimate public interest journalism”.
Submissions from Broadsheet Media supported the introduction of a levy, while submissions from The Daily Aus, Private Media (publisher of Crikey), Australian Community Media and the Public Interest Journalism Initiative supported the pooling of funds by some mechanism to support smaller independent publishing.
Greens communications spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson-Young supported the concept of a “tech tax”, but called on the government to take stronger action in relation to Meta.
“We need the government to have some guts here,” she told Crikey.
“In European jurisdictions we’ve seen working examples for making companies like Meta pay their fair share back to the community, and for better regulating harmful and anti-competitive behaviour.”
The Coalition’s dissenting report, authored by Victorian Senator Sarah Henderson, Fisher MP Andrew Wallace, and Flinders MP Zoe McKenzie, called the government’s response to Meta’s behaviour in the Australian market “weak”, while defending the News Media Bargaining Code as fit for purpose.
Henderson’s office, as well as that of shadow communications minister David Coleman, was contacted for comment and asked whether a Coalition government would have designated Meta under the code or would commit to doing so if satisfactory deals weren’t procured with Australian publishers. Neither office responded.
Disclosure: Private Media, publisher of Crikey, made submissions to the joint select committee’s report. Those submissions can be read here.