Melbourne: Australia has proposed taxing digital giants Meta, Google and TikTok with a percentage of their revenue to pay news reporters’ salaries. The government issued a draft law in this regard on Tuesday.
The government intends to introduce the same in Parliament by July 2, which would create a financial incentive for social media companies to strike deals with news organizations to pay for journalism. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that a monetary value should be attached to the work of journalists. “It should not be taken over by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits for that organization without adequate compensation for the people who produce that creative content,” Albanese said.
“We believe that investing in journalism is critical to a healthy democracy,” he added. Digital platforms have been pressured to strike deals with Australian news publishers to pay for journalism under legislation passed in 2021 that created the country’s news media bargaining code. The platforms chose to reach commercial deals with news creators rather than force them into arbitration and have a judge set the price. But they have since avoided renewing those deals by removing news from their services.
The proposed news bargaining incentives would impose a 2.25% tax on their Australian revenues for major platforms that choose not to do business deals with news publishers. The government said platforms would be given compensation and their overall costs would be reduced if they agreed to pay publishers for journalism. The government expects the incentive to raise between A$200 million and A$250 million ($144 million-$179 million) annually. Communications Minister Annika Wells said the government will distribute this income to news organizations based on the number of journalists each organization employs. Opposing the proposed legislation, Meta said news organizations “voluntarily publish content on our platforms because they get value from doing so.” “The idea that we take their news content is simply wrong,” Meta said in a statement. “This proposed legislation, which will apply to platforms regardless of whether news content appears on our services, is nothing more than a tax on digital services.”
