Former chair of the commission that began Australia's news bargaining code: AU$200M+ from Google and Meta is being injected into Australian journalism annually
Anya Schiffrin / Poynter : Tweets: @camposmello and @poynter Tweets: Patricia Campos Mello / @camposmello : Australia's news media bargaining code pries $140 million from Google and Facebook - Outlets big and small are being paid for their content, and a government review aimed at improvements is underway - @anyaSIPA https://www.poynter.org/... @poynter : In 2021, Australia broke new ground by using competition law to get Google and Facebook to pay for news they disseminate. https://www.poynter.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The figure lands mid-arc of a policy experiment Australia started in February 2021, when parliament passed the news bargaining code forcing Facebook, Google, and other platforms to pay local publishers for content they distribute. Within days, News Corp converted the leverage into a multi-year global partnership with Google carrying significant payments, and by March 2022 communications minister Paul Fletcher was defending the code's efficacy in an anniversary interview.
What makes the former commission chair's AU$200M-plus annual estimate matter is that the money flow he is quantifying is already under strain: by August 2024 Google was reported to be slashing what it spends on some Australian outlet deals after Meta said it would not renew at all, which pushed Canberra toward the draft News Bargaining Incentive scheme imposing a 2.25% revenue levy that Meta publicly rejected.
First-order effects
- Australian publishers large and small now have a public benchmark — AU$200M+ a year from Google and Meta — against which they can judge whether their individual deals under the code are paying fairly.
- Google and Meta face renewed scrutiny of their Australia spending just as both were pulling back, with the government review of the code underway and the former chair's numbers arming the case for intervention.
Second-order effects
- Meta's refusal to renew deals and Google's reported cuts convert the voluntary bargaining regime into a political problem for Canberra, directly feeding the draft 2.25% levy proposal that Meta calls simply wrong.
- Other Australian outlets negotiating renewals can anchor demands to the disclosed aggregate, raising the price floor Google must defend if it wants to avoid the levy path.
Third-order effects
- If voluntary deals keep eroding while the levy proceeds, Australia's model shifts from negotiated compensation to a statutory tax backstop — a template other jurisdictions studying the code can copy wholesale.
- Platform payments for news risk hardening into a permanent regulatory line item rather than a licensing market, with the level set by government leverage instead of bilateral deals.
The trend: Platform payments for news are moving from voluntarily negotiated deals toward government-enforced levies wherever platforms retreat, with Australia as the working prototype.