News publishers across the country are calling for the news media bargaining code to be expanded to capture new and emerging platforms, as some publishers worry about the future of licensing revenue secured under the world-first agreements.
Executives are growing wary over a reluctance from Google and Meta to renegotiate their deals after they expire, and submissions made to Treasury’s one-year review of the news media bargaining code, made public earlier this week, revealed a growing appetite among news publishers for the code to extend to platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Apple News.
Australia’s world-first news bargaining law was introduced to address the imbalance between media companies and digital platforms to ensure local news producers were being paid for their content distributed on third-party platforms.
In the period captured by the review released in December last year, Treasury said more than 30 commercial agreements had been formed between Google, Meta and Australian publishers — including Private Media, owner of Crikey — which the report said were unlikely to have been reached without the code.
In their submissions, dated May 2022, publishers said that while the code had empowered some to significantly grow their headcounts, they still had reservations about its scope and failure to address concentration in the Australian media market.
In their submission, Guardian Australia executives said they held concerns over the failure of some organisations to secure commercial agreements with the platforms, even though they meet the regulator’s qualifying standards.
Guardian Australia said it had “particular” concerns about Facebook’s “well-publicised” refusal to engage in negotiations with SBS and The Conversation.
The code was designed with a mechanism that would allow the minister for communications to “designate” a digital platform, like Meta or Google, forcing them to negotiate. Failing that, they would then be forced to go through a binding arbitration process.
However, no platforms were designated through the period covered by the review. Guardian Australia said Facebook’s decision to shut the door on both SBS and The Conversation was “another distorted outcome” of the government’s reluctance to designate.
“[Guardian Australia] acknowledges that there is the potential for this outcome to distort relevant markets, disadvantaging those news organisations by closing off a revenue stream that is available to their competitors, which are typically of a larger scale,” it said in its submission.
“We are concerned about the long-term consequences of this on the diversity of Australia’s media landscape.”
Meta defended its decision to leave the SBS and The Conversation out in the cold, saying they were eligible for other funding, including the Facebook Australian News Fund, which they say neither applied for. “That is their choice,” Meta said in its submission.
Last year’s Treasury review rejected criticisms the code had so far failed to address the gulf between publishers big and small, saying the code’s purpose was to address bargaining power imbalances, not “redistribute resources across the news sector”.
Like those at Guardian Australia, executives at Nine in their submission laid out concerns of their own, largely pegged to fears that their existing deals with the tech platforms will either “not be renewed” once they run out, or be reduced in scope.
“Nine is concerned that without designation or a clear statement of expectation from the government in relation to services and platforms that should be designated, Google and Facebook will not be as willing to enter into genuine negotiations with Nine and other Australian media business in the future,” Nine said in its submission to the review.
As a result, it called on the government to issue a statement of expectations identifying Facebook’s News Feed, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter with threats of designation, to deter them from trying to wriggle out of negotiations.
Guardian Australia also indicated that it’d like to see additional services captured by the code. Its submission pointed to the ACCC’s acknowledgement of the rising popularity of Apple News, which “some media businesses have had difficulties in monetising”.
The submission also noted that Guardian Australia’s deal with Facebook doesn’t cover Facebook’s main news feed, despite it being the product where the publisher’s content “delivers the most engagement to Facebook”.
The big techs got bullied into those agreements. The cynic in me thinks they only chucked the news services a bone because they were promised legislation that would be flawed and because they would eventually get out of things down the track. Now that time has arrived. Wonder what benefits were paid to who to make sure the legislation was junk?
This should apply only to news sites without a paywall. Why should NewsCorpse (or even Crikey) get paid to benefit from free advertising directing clicks in their direction?