Facebook and Google close to ‘significant deals’ with Australian news publishers

Google and Facebook are edging towards striking “significant commercial deals” with Australian news and media organisations as the country prepares to consider formalising laws forcing tech giants to pay to host journalism.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and its parent company Alphabet, spoke with the country’s Government over the weekend to make what treasurer Josh Frydenberg described as “great progress”.

The proposed code would force tech giants including Google and Facebook to pay publishers and media companies for their news content, following years of falling advertising revenue in both print media and news websites.

Parliamentary discussion

Australia’s parliament is due to debate the bill that would turn the code into law on Tuesday, during which Mr Frydenberg is likely to reveal further details of the “very promising” conversations.

“We’ve made real progress, I think, in the last 48 to 72 hours and I think we’re going to see some significant commercial deals which could be of real benefit to the domestic media landscape and see journalists rewarded financially for generating original content, as it should be, and this is a world-leading reform,” the treasurer told Nine Network television.

He told radio programme AM that both tech companies were “very focused” on the proposed code’s progress in Australia, and that he sensed they were “also trying to meet deals”.

“Both the media proprietors and the digital giants recognise that we have something that is workable here in Australia.”

‘A dangerous prescedent’

Both Facebook and Google have opposed the code, prompting Google to threaten to withdraw its search engine from the country altogether and claiming it sets a “dangerous precedent”. Facebook said it would prevent users in Australia from either posting links to news articles or viewing any news content on the social network.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, suggested the US should consider following in Australia’s footsteps, calling the legislation an “opportunity to combine good business with a good cause”.

“We shouldn’t be too quick to conclude that we can’t innovate in the US the way the Aussies are,” Mr Smith told news site Axios. “Sometimes it takes someone who has a powerful microphone to ensure that many voices are heard and that’s not a bad thing”.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which holds around 3.6 per cent of the Australian search engine market compared to Google’s 94.5 per cent, could stand to benefit significantly from the new law.

Seven West Media, a large media firm in the country, has become the first major publisher to agree terms for its articles to appear in new Google platform News Showcase, a feature within Google News that highlights news within panels.

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