Australia plans to responsibility digital platforms that don’t pay for information

MELBOURNE, Australia — The Australian government said Thursday it will responsibility large digital platforms and search engines unless they consent to distribute turnover with Australian information media organizations.

The responsibility would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than 250 million Australian dollars ($160 million) a year in turnover from Australia, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

The responsibility would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations. The size of the responsibility is not obvious. But the government aims to make sharing turnover with media organizations the cheaper alternative.

“The real objective … is not to raise turnover — we aspiration not to raise any turnover. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and information media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.

The shift comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian information publishers for their content.

A previous government introduced in 2021 laws called the information Media Bargaining Code that forced tech giants to strike turnover-sharing deals with Australian media companies or face fines of 10% of their Australian turnover.

Meta said in a statement the current law was flawed and the U.S. business continued to have “concerns about charging one industry to subsidise another.”

“The proposal fails to account for the realities of how our platforms work, specifically that most people don’t arrive to our platforms for information content and that information publishers voluntarily choose to post content on our platforms because they receive worth from doing so,” the statement said.

Google has struck turnover-sharing agreements with more than 80 Australian information companies in the history three years and has committed to renewing those deals.

But Google has raised doubts about the government’s recent way.

“The government’s introduction of a targeted responsibility risks the ongoing viability of commercial deals with information publishers in Australia,” a Google statement said.

“We are reviewing today’s announcement and will have more to declare once we’ve assessed the packed impact,” Google added.

TikTok noted that its users didn’t seek information.

“As an entertainment platform, TikTok has never been the leave to place for information. We will actively engage in the consultation procedure and look forward to hearing more details,” a TikTok statement said.

Jones said Australian officials had explained the government’s intentions to their counterparts in the United States, where most of the digital giants are headquartered. President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is planning to boost tariffs against some countries, which has the potential to trigger trade wars.

“We desire to ensure that they comprehend the reasoning, also comprehend that this is not a responsibility in the normal sense of the word,” Jones said.

“This is an incentive to bolster up a law that has existed in Australia since 2021,” he added.

Rowland said the turnover-sharing was needed to safeguard Australian democracy.

“The rapid growth of digital platforms in recent years has disrupted Australia’s media landscape and it is threatening the viability of community yield journalism,” Rowland said.

“The policy intent here is very obvious. It is to incentivize deals between digital platforms, search engines, and Australian information publishers in order to back the health of our democracy,” she added.