Nine Entertainment, the publisher of this masthead, is seeking to negotiate new deals alongside media companies such as Seven West Media, NewsCorp Australia, Guardian Australia and others.
The government will issue a formal response on Monday to a Treasury inquiry into the news bargaining code that recommended changes to the law to help the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) monitor the market.
Jones and Rowland said the government had agreed to the proposal to give the ACCC the power to demand information from the industry as part of regular reports that will help examine the outcomes from the code.
While the government has not released the detail of the compulsory information-gathering powers, it said it expected the new measures to help ensure fair negotiations with news providers.
“Many commercial agreements between Australian news businesses and digital platforms will expire over the next year,” the government said.
“The government expects that digital platforms with significant bargaining power will negotiate in good faith towards the renewal of existing agreements, and potentially new agreements, with Australian news businesses.”
Former ACCC chair Rod Sims concluded, in a report for the Judith Nielsen Institute, that the last round of deals were worth about $200 million a year to the news providers.
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The federal move comes at a sensitive time because the Australian regime was seen as a global precedent in 2021 and led to similar measures overseas including the Online News Act in Canada, which is now the subject of a fierce dispute.
Facebook’s owner, Meta, has pulled out of news in Canada since August, in an echo of its news ban in Australia in February 2021.
Meta reversed the news ban at Facebook in Australia when then treasurer Josh Frydenberg reached a compromise on the bargaining code to give the digital giants the ability to negotiate commercial deals with each media company to avoid being “designated” in the federal law and subject to more onerous regulation.
The Canadian approach forces the digital media companies to submit to a single national system with a fixed payment.
“While the Australian government engaged with Google and Meta to develop provisions for platforms and traditional media to make deals outside the code, the Canadian government provides no option for designated entities to separately negotiate with traditional media,” wrote Australian National University research fellow Tanvi Nair in an analysis in October.
“Under the Canadian law, platforms will be required to pay per link to a news article without room for negotiation.”
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