It’s way too early to know if Labor’s efforts to compel tech companies to pay their way will make a lick of difference.
Until the digital giants such as Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance show their willingness to negotiate in good faith with Australian news businesses for the use of their content, the future of journalism in this country remains uncertain.
But if, in a few years time, Australian newsrooms are producing high quality journalism, and if those newsrooms are occupied by the next generation of reporters and producers and videographers and future editors who are committed to the profession and understand it to be a viable and vital career path, then Michelle Rowland and Stephen Jones can take significant credit.
Since February, when Meta announced it was walking away from the payment-for-content deals it had struck in 2021 with Australian news companies, Rowland and Jones have consulted widely with all corners of the industry to find a solution to the tech giants’ short-changing of local media outlets.
It’s been a hard slog. For a start, Meta doesn’t accept the premise of the argument that they profit from news content on its platforms. The Mark Zuckerberg-controlled company pushes the idea that hardly anyone access news content on its sites, so why should they pay for it?
Yet numerous independent surveys of social media users suggest they hunger for hard news feeds.
The previous government’s news media bargaining code worked for a time but tech companies identified a loophole: they could simply remove news content from their platforms, and carry on outside the boundaries of the legislation.
Rowland and Jones considered several options to plug the hole, from “designating” the tech giants under the terms of the code, to the imposition of a levy.
What they have come up with – the News Bargaining Incentive – appears, at first blush, to be an effective refresh of the Morrison government’s code. At its core, Labor’s policy seeks to make the tech giants pay the rent. Nothing more, nothing less.
Quality journalism is a crucial component of a healthy democracy. It is also expensive. And if digital platforms continue to skim profits off the back of a product that they won’t pay for, then it’s a race to the bottom. No one wins.
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