ACCC calls for tech giants to pay for journalism

ACCC calls for bargaining code, accusing Facebook and Google of undermining the economic foundations of journalism.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims backs recommendations that tech giants be subject to a bargaining code with news organisations.

Facebook and Google are undermining the economic foun­dations of journalism and should be subjected to a government-mandated bargaining code whenever they deal with news organisations, according to the nation’s competition watchdog.

This intervention is justified because the tech giants are damaging journalism, which is a public good that affects the community.

Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said he hoped the Morrison government would accept the commission’s call for a bargaining code to govern relations between the tech giants and the news media.

“For us, this is all about the ­future of journalism,” he told a conference in Sydney organised by the business law section of the Law Council of Australia on Friday.

“Journalism is a public good and whenever you have a public good, particularly one as large as this, government is inevitably ­involved,” Mr Sims said.

His warning comes at a time when the government is under pressure to reform secrecy laws that triggered police raids in June on the ABC’s Sydney newsroom and the Canberra home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst.

Leading figures from mainstream media organisations had talks during the week with ­Attorney-General Christian Porter about reforming those laws and easing other restrictions that prevent the media reporting activities of the federal government.

Law Council president Arthur Moses told the conference that the legal profession’s peak ­national body “stands with the media — a free press exists for all Australians”.

He said the Law Council “has been at loggerheads with the government” about secrecy laws and their effect on journalists ­“because we have been getting, in effect, law student-type assertions being made by the ­Attorney-General”.

He said no one should be satisfied with Mr Porter’s ministerial direction to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions that no journalist should be prosecuted for specified offences without his approval.

This meant a politician would be deciding whether particular journalists should be prosecuted.

Mr Sims told the conference Google and Facebook were engaged in a process he described as “atomising” the news in the sense that they were attempting to ­become the source of all news.

“That atomisation makes it very hard for news companies to monetise their product,” he said.

This also made it difficult for news organisations to monetise investigative journalism because exclusive news reports were quickly displaced online by slightly ­altered versions of the same story.

“To use one of Paul Keating’s best lines, they just put a brick on top of the building and claim they are building their own,” he said.

Mr Sims said the need to subject the tech giants to a bargaining code was the most important recommendation from the commission’s June report on the digital platforms.

That recommendation, which is still being considered by the government, would give the tech giants nine months to draw up a code governing their relationships with news organisations or have a standard code imposed.

They would be required to negotiate fairly about how revenue should be shared and how news ­organisations are compensated for the use of their journalism.