The spirit of regulation is sweeping over the digital Titan
Nowadays, the Australian government is not inactive observing the growth of enormous corporations, such as Google and Facebook. After a proposal to remove messaging services for under-16s, the uk is now contemplating regarding payment for the potentially defamatory content published by these social media touching recent rejections by meta, facebook’s parent company, as per FT.
Taxes in the interest of published content
What the bill presents is that, the Australian Taxation Authority will be the one to collect the funds realised by this new mechanism. Of course, he would not have any gains from this operation; all the intended profits would go to the media companies. As a consequence, any platform that crossed the Australian $160 million (or about A$250 million) revenue would have to pay a flat rate or negotiate directly with publishers.
A measure good by the media industry
Industry leaders, including Michael Miller, the executive chairman of News Corp Australia, did not hesitate to congratulate the government for the move. As Miller stated, “This will allow for reconstruction of the media industry and following this year’s estimate of one thousand media jobs that have been cut, Australian media companies will continue to promote investigative and professional journalism as it has never been needed more by democratic communities.”
A Canadian precedent
Canada had implemented a similar rule in 2023 to demand that technology and social media giants pay publishers for sharing their content. In a result of this decision, Meta completely banned the country’s news and Google, who threatened to do so, started negotiations and finally agreed to pay about 71 million (100 million CAD) per year for the news publishers.