Deciphering the code's future
What happens when you Google search ‘news media bargaining code google’? When I typed in that phrase this week, the first result returned was ‘An open letter’ from Google Australia managing director Mel Silva, which announced, ‘We have found a constructive path to support journalism that enables payments to be made to news publishers through Google News Showcase, instead of requiring payment for links’. That letter dates from 2021. A lot has happened since then.
Next came links to the ACCC, Wikipedia, and Treasury. Only much further down the list of results was there a link to a story that appeared last month in the Australian Financial Review, entitled, 'Google inks renewed media bargaining code deals – with a catch'. The story reported that the original three-year deals Google struck in 2021 due to the code were being replaced by one-year deals.
By contrast, DuckDuckGo returned a more newsworthy result. DuckDuckGo, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a search engine that respects privacy. As a result, its results are, frankly, inconsistent. All that respect for privacy clearly limits a search engine’s ability to gobble up information. What's more, DuckDuckGo doesn’t have the colossal scale that gives Google its freakish power to access data. As I’ve previously argued, it’s fair to characterise Google and its fellow platforms as Panopticon 3.0.
At the top of its results, DuckDuckGo returned links to two stories published this week. One, published on the Capital Brief site, is headlined ‘Google shrinks media code deals by 40% as Labor weighs options on Meta’. The other, at the Fin Review, is titled, ‘Google wants to slash what it pays news outlets as levy calls grow’.
These stories reported that Google is stripping back the deals it is offering news media businesses as a result of the code. These deals had been worth upwards of an estimated $130million annually. A 40 per cent reduction would cut deep, particularly following Meta’s February announcement that it would not be renewing its deals, worth an estimated $70million annually. How serious is the withdrawal of all this money? News businesses including Nine and News Corp were quick to blame Meta for their sweeping recent job cuts. The truth is more layered, of course, but certainly the code gave Australian news media a major boost.
Question is, has the boost ended? The government is currently grappling with the question of whether to retain the code, and whether to designate relevant digital platforms, thus forcing them to negotiate deals with news media businesses for use of their content. Meanwhile, two related developments are significant. One, digital platforms keep making deals with news media businesses for the use of news content by generative-AI services. It’s hard not to see these deals as a pre-emptive strike to ward off any code-like interventions. Two, the government is reportedly considering replacing the code with a levy, something we’ve argued for repeatedly as potentially neater, clearer and fairer. Here at CMT, we’re currently researching what a viable public interest journalism levy imposed on digital platforms might look like.
For now, the future of the code remains cryptic.
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior lecturer - UTS Law
