Coalition’s ACCC digital platforms response: tech titans won’t be shaking in their boots

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts Paul Fletcher during a press conference in Melbourne on Thursday.

The Government’s long-awaited response to the ACCC’s digital platforms report is not ineffectual, but it is hardly going to leave the likes of Facebook and Google shaking in their boots.

Asking Google and Facebook to voluntarily play nice has been a consistent error of governments and regulators around the world. What has made Google and Facebook sit up and take notice are new laws and billions of dollars in fines for breaking those laws.

One of the key recommendations put up by ACCC chairman Rod Sims six months ago was the development of several codes of conduct.

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One was to address the imbalance in the bargaining relationship between platforms and new media businesses, and another for “conduct for disinformation and news quality” ie fake news.

Crucially, this means the likes of Google and Facebook paying up for the use of the journalism that appears on their platforms.

Ignore the protestations of the digital giants — they make a lot of money from original journalism produced by professional media organisations through the click interest it generates on their platforms.

Digital platforms have consistently delayed and obfuscated their way out of anything that means real regulation or revenue sharing.

Getting Google and Facebook to actually provide some revenue back to the media companies that write, break and generate the news they rely on for billions of clicks into their platforms a year is key for the survival of original and professional journalism.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer were keen to talk up the fact it has adopted the recommendations for a voluntary code of conduct, particularly in relation to bargaining imbalances and paying for fair use.

According to the response, the ACCC will provide a “progress report” on the code negotiations in May 2020, and the codes to be finalised by November 2020.

The fact that Rod Sims and the ACCC will be in charge of this process, not ACMA, is heartening.

However, crucially, by allowing the codes to be voluntary kicks the can down the road for at least another year before anything changes in terms of revenue streams to media organisations.

Both Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have said they’ll be tracking the development of the codes, with the Prime Minister claiming “a mandatory code will happen”.

“We’re not messing around here,” said the Treasurer. Well, one can only hope, but history tells us otherwise.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Digital platforms have consistently delayed and obfuscated their way out of anything that means real regulation or revenue sharing.

If it comes to November 2020 and the digital platforms pull out of a voluntary code or won’t agree on terms, how long off is a mandatory code going to be? Another year or two while journalists continue to lose their jobs?

From a political and business perspective it might be worth their while to cut a deal on revenue sharing, but who’s going to make them if they change their mind?

Rod Sims told The Australian after the release of his report in July he was astounded the digital platforms consistently said “trust us” in terms of regulation, just don’t force us to pay any new fees or abide by new real hard regulation. Sims’s response was that “trust us” was not good enough anymore.

Why should it be any different come November 2020?