This week, the Federal Government released draft legislation that would force big social media companies to pay for the news that appears on their platforms.

If you have déjà vu… same. We have been here before (more than once), but now there is proposed legislation that, if passed, could shape what news looks like in this country for years to come.

Of course, as an independent media company, it also has direct implications for TDA, and for our relationship with you. Let’s get into what this all means!

So here’s the headline of the week: The Government wants big tech to pay for news, and they’ve finally released the details of how they intend to do that. It’s through something called the News Media Bargaining Incentive (NBI).

To understand this story, we have to rewind back to 2021. Picture this: Sam and I just quit our full-time jobs to launch The Daily Aus as a business. We were sitting on the floor of an investor’s office, working on our laptops, when we heard the news: Facebook had taken all news off its platforms. Given we’d just derailed our entire life plans to give this whole ‘news on social media’ thing a shot, you can imagine we were both really calm.

That exercise was us learning in real time about the implications of a fallout between the social media giant and the former government over a world-first law. The law, called the Media Bargaining Code, forced tech giants to do deals with media publishers.

Similar to what was announced this week, the logic was that news companies were bringing lots of eyeballs to platforms like Facebook, and that they weren’t receiving any compensation for that.

Despite the initial taking-news-off-Facebook hiccup, the tech companies ended up playing ball, and most of the major Australian publishers signed multi-year deals with both Google and Meta worth millions of dollars. TDA was not included in these negotiations and did not receive a deal under that Code (though for transparency, we did receive a separate one-off grant from Google to accelerate our newsletter growth). During that time, we put our heads down and focused on building a sustainable news media company.

That was until 2024…

In 2024, Meta announced it wouldn't be renewing those deals. That meant it was breaking the aforementioned law, and the government was faced with two options.

A) Ignore the fact that Meta wasn’t holding up their end of the deal and hope not to annoy one of the biggest companies in the world.

B) Force Meta to pay for news and risk them pulling all news off their platforms. The precedent for this option was Canada, a country that hasn’t had any news on Insta or Facebook since it passed similar legislation in 2023 (hello Canadians who can only read our work here!)

In the end, the Government chose option C, which was to design an entirely new model to help facilitate the flow of money between big tech and news companies in Australia… and that brings us to this week.

The News Media Bargaining Incentive facilitates payments from big tech to news companies via two routes. 

The Government is now asking for feedback on this model before they introduce legislation later this year.

Safe to say big tech isn’t thrilled about the announcement. A Meta spokesperson called the draft legislation a “digital services tax.”

“News organisations voluntarily post content on our platforms because they receive value from doing so.”

A spokesperson for Google said: “We reject the need for this tax.”

“It ignores the fact that Google already has commercial agreements with the news industry... and mandates payments from some companies while arbitrarily excluding platforms like Microsoft, Snapchat and OpenAI”.

Our position on the news media bargaining code has always been pretty consistent. The original model didn’t incentivise innovation; it just gave legacy outlets millions of dollars and newer, independent players nothing. It masked the fact that a lot of media outlets are struggling to reach new audiences and monetise modern media - that’s not good for anyone.

The new proposal includes a step in the right direction: a stronger incentive for platforms to do deals with smaller, independent publishers. If that survives into the final draft, it could matter for smaller outlets like ours. We'll be pushing for a version that supports entrepreneurial newsrooms, not just the same legacy companies the original code already benefited.

The bigger risk isn't whether we end up with a deal. It's whether the platforms decide the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth and pull news from Australian feeds entirely. That would be bad for the millions of young Aussies who we know get most of their news from Instagram and TikTok.

Whatever you think of those platforms, the reality is that most Australians under 35 live there. Removing news from those environments doesn't make anyone better informed; it just makes the void easier to fill with stuff that isn't.

We've spent years deliberately building TDA so our relationship with you doesn't depend on any single platform. Our newsletters, the podcast, the website: no algorithm change or government policy can take those away. They exist because we've invested in them, and because hundreds of thousands of you have chosen to subscribe for free.

TDA+U is how you can ensure we keep growing and investing in that. It's our voluntary contribution program for readers who get genuine value from what we do and want to support it directly. We want to keep our content as accessible as possible, which means we don’t put anything behind a paywall. Your contributions help us continue to invest in journalists and build our newsroom.

The value of a newsroom accountable to its audience, not to a platform, has rarely been clearer than it is right now. If you've been thinking about joining, this is a good week to do it.

Thank you in advance!

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