Facebook has successfully called the bluff of the Morrison government, with a few days’ shutdown of the pages of Australia’s media companies — and plenty of other collateral damage — securing a major watering-down of the government’s extortion racket “news media bargaining code”.
Yesterday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg blinked and announced a new set of amendments to the legislation that “will provide further clarity to digital platforms and news media businesses about the way the code is intended to operate”.
When the amendments appeared yesterday evening — so hastily drafted the new supplementary explanatory memorandum had a typo in it — they showed the government had significantly shifted the balance of power of the code in favour of Facebook.
The tech giant duly signalled it would restore the pages of the media companies, albeit reserving the right to take them down again in the future.
Facebook was particularly aggrieved that under the existing code, the entire process, from being designated under the code, to being packed off, to final offer arbitration, could be rushed through by publishers. Now it needs to be given a month’s notice about being designated, and final offer arbitration — the government’s trump card in the whole code, under which an arbitrator could only pick one offer out of the platform’s and publishers — is now a “last resort” that will only occur after two months of mediation.
Moreover the process of being designated under the code now requires the treasurer to “also consider whether the group comprised of the responsible digital platform corporation and all of its related bodies corporate has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through agreements in relation to news content of Australian news businesses”.
And those “agreements” can now vary dramatically between media companies. Previously, a media company could trigger what is called the “non-differentiation” clause if it was eligible under the code but didn’t receive the same deal as other media companies.
Not merely can Facebook now remunerate different companies differently without triggering the clause, it can give preferential ranking to one company over another. Facebook can do a deal with Nine for $20 million, but then do a deal with News Corp for $15 million and, in exchange, rank News Corp’s content over Nine’s.
And the non-differentiation clause itself has been tightened so that only “news sources which regularly produce covered news content” are covered.
But just to cement Facebook’s much greater control of the process, the government has now changed the explanatory memorandum for the legislation to make clear what digital platforms the code covers: “This code only applies to the extent a platform is making covered news content available through those services intentionally.”
That’s why Facebook executive Campbell Brown said yesterday that the amendments allowed Facebook to “support the publishers we choose to … the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation”.
Unless Facebook intentionally makes news content available, it is not covered by the code. And you’ll have to do a deal with Facebook for it to intentionally run your content.
The rest of the world will take note that Australia has blinked — some already have.
Facebook is now nutting out deals with big media companies, with a dramatically stronger hand in negotiations than previously. The result will still be the same — whatever money is involved will simply flow to the bottom lines of media companies, rather than into public interest journalism.
But as we know, this has never had anything to do with supporting journalism, whatever lies the media companies may tell us.
Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, receives funds from Google’s News Showcase.
Thank you for covering this entire ordeal as the only publisher showing some journalistic integrity (and making any logical sense). The government folding shows that it had no idea what is going on and how the internet works and FB stood its ground. It’s embarrassing that this is our government to the rest of the world who does have any idea of how the 21st century operates but at least they didn’t double down further into the path of mind-numbing stupidity
The very suggestion that Morrison/Frydenberg could outmanoeuvre business-savvy Zuckerberg is hilarious. The Keystone Cops spring to mind.
W.C. Fields “Never Give a Zucker an Even Break” – the “emergency run” and trail of destruction at the end?
Sorry, that’s “Sucker” of course.
There are enough billionaires in the world that statistically some of them must care about journalism. They could set up pools of money dedicated to independent investigative journalism that would fund what we need. Even those Silicon Valley companies that are run by those who “want to make the world a better place” could similarly fund such journalism. Yet they don’t. They spend huge amounts of money lobbying politicians, pushing soft influence in order to be more wealthy. But doing things that would make the world a better place? Nah.
Don’t forget that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and keeps it going, from his personal pocket change… I don’t read it myself, but I believe that it’s thought of as journalism.
Yeah, and in return he gets a megaphone on the virtues of Amazon. It’s all chump change to him…
Soros does with Project Syndicate.
Well you wouldn’t know anything about the vast tracts of ground given from reading anything in News Corp, Nine, Seven, and even the GA and ABC. (Very, very disappointed, disgusted even, in the latter two demonstrating how quickly they can join the filthy MSM throng and abandon ethical journalism to run skewed or disinformation when it suits/there’s possibility of a buck to be made.) This whole thing is a depressing indictment of so many things. Either a government and its competition regulator failing to understand the nature of the relationship between a host platform providing a means for (so-called) news media to promote their product and lure prospective paying customers to their door, and drafting extortive legislation principally to benefit certain media organisations which provide the Government with favourable coverage. Or a government and its competition regulator actually understanding the nature of the relationship but exploiting public ignorance of it to draft extortive legislation to principally benefit said media mates and their favourable coverage of the Government. And then, of course, there’s a supposedly free-market government drafting extortive legislation to prop up those media mates whose digital era business plan has been to simply sit on their hands and watch the former classifieds rivers of gold be diverted by clever people with digital platforms and just whinge – only getting their hands out from under their arses to grasp for money from anywhere including public money (doubly infuriating given their aversion to paying tax). And as for those same media mate companies lying through their teeth about the quality of their “news” product, well, that’s perhaps the most depressing aspect as they spew an endless stream of disinformation and bias with impunity while simultaneously laying waste to media diversity and community media.
Thank you, Crikey (and Michael West Media and other independents) for remaining above this foul fray and reporting it straight. You keep alive a little hope in my heart.
Yes it’s called “the media scrum” – with a silent “r”.
Quick work Bernard! That’s where popularist gestures lead, like Trump’s wall. It’s all about standing up to the foreigners, hoping the cameras aren’t around when you then get knocked down.
Speaking for myself, I don’t see what the fuss is about. No-one needs facebook to get news or, indeed anything else. Facebook doesn’t have anything you can’t get somewhere else. Everyone could just stop using it right now and it would just go away. The govt. should have just ignored it. Seems to me the only “power” facebook had was to convince that village idiot Fraudenberg that anyone actually needs it.
This was only ever about News Corpse and forcing Google and Facebook to pay the LNP’s Media Arm for the referrals to News Corpse it sends them. The $$$ that Facebook would not have paid Murdoch and the actual idea that Facebook doesnt have to publish News (as is their right) was simply too much for Hillsong Scotty and Gruppenfuhrer Fraudenburg! The idea that a company could say “No it’s too expensive so we will cease operating that Service” was too much for their tiny minds to handle. So much for “we are proceeding with the legislation “as is”.