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“For platforms like Meta to be more determined to take journalists off their platform than they are criminals means they’ve got a real moral problem at the epicentre of that company, and it can’t continue.”

Those were the words of Federal Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones earlier this week. By any measure, those are some pretty strong words for a government minister to be directing towards a private company. So what’s the context? Why on earth is the Government talking about Meta taking journalists off their platform?

Let’s jump into it.

Background

It all goes back to a piece of legislation that was passed by the Morrison Government. It was called the Media Bargaining Code and essentially, it was designed to regulate the commercial relationship between news publishers and big tech companies like Meta and Google in Australia.

The basic premise was that news outlets were responsible for bringing millions of eyeballs to these tech platforms, but weren’t sharing in any of the commercial benefits that came from those eyeballs (like advertising dollars). This law wanted to change that by developing a mechanism through which big tech would enter into agreements to pay (some) news publishers in Australia.

At the time, the law was highly contentious - so much so that it resulted in Meta completely removing news (and concerningly, news-adjacent pages like emergency services) off Facebook in protest.

That only lasted a few days though, and after a direct phone call between then-Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, the issue was resolved and Meta agreed to voluntarily enter into a commercial agreement with news publishers. Google agreed to do the same and for a while there, it looked like the law was working as intended, with roughly $200 million a year flowing to newsrooms to help bolster journalism.

Meta’s backflip

That illusion was shattered last month, when Meta announced it wasn’t going be renewing those commercial deals that it had agreed to.

In announcing this, it said: “To ensure that we continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement, we will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries.”

At the same time, Meta also announced it was closing down the Facebook news tab (I work in news and can say I didn’t even know this existed) and that it would also limit users’ ability to ‘discover’ political content. The tech giant’s reasoning was that people don’t come to Meta for news and that the company needed to allocate resources and investment to the things that people are engaging with.

And while Meta is a private company that is well entitled to make whatever decisions it likes about its business strategy, this announcement presented a big problem for the Albanese Government.

A bunch of big newsrooms across the country are now set to lose millions from the deals that Meta withdrew from (just to clarify: The Daily Aus never had a deal, it was mostly with legacy media) and want the tech platform to be held to account.

What does that look like? Well, the Government is currently figuring that out.

So what happens next?

The most obvious option available to the Government is to force Meta to come back to the negotiating table - there’s a fancy word for that under the law called ‘designation’.

However, this option, which is being lobbied for by most of those newsrooms who have lost millions of dollars, could have some pretty major consequences. To understand these consequences, we need to look to Canada, where negotiations broke down between the Government and Meta over the same idea last year.

Instead of reaching an agreement, Meta proceeded to completely remove all news off its platforms (Instagram, Facebook). For the last eight months, any time a Canadian has tried to find The Daily Aus, they’ve been met with this message.

And so right now, the Government is figuring out what to do. Does it force Meta to negotiate and risk the very likely possibility of Meta refusing to comply and removing all news? Does it do nothing and be accused of not standing up to big tech? Does it go back to the drawing board and try to amend the law to create a different outcome?

The final say

Ultimately, the decision will be made by the Communications Minister and the Assistant Treasurer, who remarked this week “without journalism, God help us”.

We here at The Daily Aus tend to agree, and it’s why supporting independent journalism is more important than ever.

If anyone is reading this and wants to know what they can do to help - the answer is to spread the word about The Daily Aus’ newsletter. Building the audience of this newsletter is our main priority, because no matter what happens, it can’t be taken away.

If everyone reading this right now convinced one other person to sign up (you can send them this link!), it would ensure the future of The Daily Aus for years to come.

Thank you, as always, for supporting us!

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