Bushfires raging out of control? Facebook banning news from its platform? Wait, haven’t we seen all this before?
Last month, tens of thousands of people had to flee their homes as wildfires raged in northwestern Canada. As Al Jazeera reported, the evacuation of Yellowknife had residents scrambling to find potentially life-saving information about emergency flights, road closures and temporary shelters. But when they turned to Facebook and Instagram, the residents found nothing, because Meta had blocked access to news in Canada in protest against the Online News Act, which forces digital platforms to share revenue with news media outlets.
The déjà vu was uncanny. In 2020, with Australia still licking its wounds after deadly bushfires, the Morrison government announced it would introduce a mandatory bargaining code to level the playing field between digital platforms and news media businesses. Google and Facebook weren’t happy. In January 2021, Google released a 2-minute video in which managing director Mel Silva said, ‘Paying for links breaks the way search engines work, and it undermines the way the web works too.’ And in February, Facebook banned news, with information services such as the Bureau of Meteorology and emergency services caught up in the ban.
By late February, Facebook Australia had reinstated news and the new law passed, but only after major concessions to digital platforms. Primarily, the government agreed that it would not apply the new law (including its provision for final offer arbitration) to a digital service if the government was satisfied that the digital service had made significant contributions to news media. Despite the concessions, the law’s effects have been dramatic, prompting an estimated $200 million to flow annually from Meta and Google to news media businesses.
Is Australia’s law good? Yes. Is it fair? Mostly. Is it a link tax? Not even close. Australia’s law isn’t a link tax, and it hasn’t broken the web. It redistributes advertising revenue from digital platforms (who display news content) to news media (who create news content). There are flaws in Australia’s law, led by its lack of transparency about the deals it’s prompted, but it has given public interest journalism a warranted and much-needed boost. The Canadian law looks set to do the same, just as Google and Meta run precisely the same scare campaigns as they did in Australia. Once upon a time, Google and Meta described themselves as disruptors. Now they’re the ones desperately trying to avoid disruption.
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer - UTS Law