News in call for curbs on big tech

News Corp Australia has accused the tech giants of being the biggest single cause of damage to media.

News Corp Australia Executive Charman Michael Miller and Director of Corporate Affairs Campbell Reid at the Press Freedom Hearing in Sydney. Picture: Dylan Robinson

News Corp Australia has accused the tech giants of being the biggest single cause of damage to Australian media and called for measures that would prevent companies such as Google and Facebook from using content and data unless they signed up to a code of conduct backed by legislation.

News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller says that without swift measures to legislate reforms, more jobs in media will be lost and communities will lose valuable sources of information.

Writing in The Australian on Monday, Mr Miller says the pain is particularly stark for independent publishers and that the technology platforms have tried to frustrate media companies building subscription services to fund their journalism rather than giving it away or relying on advertising.

He calls for swift action to legislate recommendations from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission inquiry into digital platforms amid an intensified lobbying campaign from the tech giants to block regulation of their industry.

The report, released in July, made 23 recommendations and found a need to address the ­imbalance between traditional media and technology companies such as Facebook and Google. The federal government has backed the report and said it would respond to the recommendations by the end of the year.

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“We should be clear from the outset: no one has damaged journalism and Australians’ ability to receive trusted, reliable information more than the big tech platforms,” Mr Miller says.

“Their extraordinary profits are based on their unfair commercial exploitation of other people’s content — and powerful legislative changes are needed to correct this imbalance.”

In a submission to Treasury, News Corp Australia, publisher of The Australian, backed a recommendation for the ACCC to set up a digital branch to monitor potentially unfair and anti-competitive practices and enforce competition and consumer issues.

The submission said Google and Facebook had become “unavoidable business partners”, but oversight was needed of how their algorithms ranked and distributed news content and ­advertising to consumers.

News also backed a new code of conduct to govern relations between news media and the digital platforms.

But it said the code should be backed by legislation and ­enforced by the ACCC because of its competition expertise, rather than the Australian Communications and Media Authority, as proposed in the final report.

Mr Miller says the government should legislate minimum standards, prohibit anti-competitive or discriminatory practices and set out real consequences for breaches.

Platforms would be banned from using any publisher’s content and from collecting any data generated from it unless all publishers had negotiated agreements. News also wants an inquiry into the supply of ad tech services, a market that it says is “opaque by design” and dominated by Google and Facebook.