Interview with co-CEO of Atlassian Scott Farquhar on Australia as a test bed for tech regulation, the media bargaining code, running a global company, and more
tech companies do not like to admit that they employ lobbyists, and lobby governments furiously. But it's starting to come out into the open now. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : We've heard so much about Facebook vs Australia, but I wanted a broader perspective — so I called up @scottfarkas, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, Australia's biggest tech company, to talk about the splintering internet. DECODER: https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Scott Farquhar built Atlassian into Australia's biggest tech company — he and Mike Cannon-Brookes were the country's first startup-to-IPO tech billionaires per the 2019 founders' profile — so when he tells Nilay Patel that Australia is functioning as a test bed for tech regulation, it reads as more than a founder opining. The interview lands mid-crisis: Facebook had just blacked out Australian news rather than pay under the new media bargaining code.
The code's first outcomes were already visible in the surrounding coverage: News Corp secured a multi-year global deal with 'significant payments' from Google, and analysis of Facebook's news ban concluded the giants will surrender money but not platform control. Farquhar's vantage point differs — Atlassian sells software rather than distributing news — making him an unusually neutral witness on whether a small market can set terms for global platforms.
First-order effects
- Farquhar puts Atlassian publicly on record that Australia's rules are drafted with the world watching, and — breaking the sector's habit — acknowledges that tech companies lobby governments furiously, now increasingly in the open.
- The framing separates Atlassian from Google and Meta, whose bargaining-code fight dominates the coverage, letting Australia's largest tech company defend national regulation without being party to the publisher standoff.
Second-order effects
- Publishers elsewhere gain a precedent to cite: News Corp's global content-for-payments deal with Google shows the code can extract money, while Facebook's ban shows the counter-move is cutting a whole country off.
- Other governments weighing similar codes can watch two live data points from one market — payment via negotiation, or blackout via retaliation — which raises the stakes for how Canberra enforces the code next.
Third-order effects
- Australia's own communications minister was still assessing the bargaining code's efficacy with Google and Meta a year on, suggesting the country intends to keep iterating here rather than retreat — and that other regulators will keep importing the template.
- If lobbying stays out in the open, small markets like Australia will increasingly price their regulatory ambition against platforms' demonstrated willingness to walk away — trading news distribution itself as leverage.
The trend: Australia is consolidating its role as the jurisdiction where platform regulation gets tested first, with both its payments and its bans becoming exportable templates for other governments.