Australia passes landmark legislation to deal with Facebook and Google
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Canberra, Feb 25: The Australian Parliament has passed the landmark legislation called the 'News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code' on Feb 25, 2021, mainly targetting Facebook and Google. The legislation mandates global digital platforms to pay for publishing the Australian news content on their respective platforms.
The law was easily passed as the tech giants, Facebook and Google, signed agreements with the govt to pay Australian news organizations. The agreement was signed in order to avoid the tough mandatory bargaining rules under the new regulation. The legislation will ensure that news businesses 'are fairly paid for their content' and will also help in sustaining 'Public Interest Journalism' in the country.
The Australian Parliament had proposed the legislation targeting Google and Facebook. Under the legislation, the tech giants are required to make payment negotiations with the media companies in order to use their content. However, Facebook and Google had pointed out that these media industries were already benefiting from the traffic routed to their websites through these digital platforms.
Facebook had earlier stated that the legislation will cause 'unmanageable levels of financial risks as well as operational risk' for the tech giant. Following this, Facebook had also blocked the Australian users from reading and sharing local and international news on its platform, recently. Facebook had initiated the move against the new legislation and stated that the law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between Facebook and the publishers who share news content using the platform. Whereas Google had already started to ink agreements on revenue-sharing with the publishers.
Australia is not the only nation to have passed any such legislation in order to regulate the monetary aspects of digital media. The French parliament in 2019 had passed the legislation called the 'GAFA Tax', that is an acronym for 'Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.' The French legislation was passed in a bid to impose a 3% per cent levy on sales, which are generated in the country by non-tax paying online giants. Besides, even the European Union had passed the 'Digital Services Act' and 'Digital Markets Act' that seeks to limit the powers of global tech giants such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon in the European market, under which the larger firms have been designated as ‘digital gatekeepers’ and they are subject to strict regulations in case they violate the market norms.