Credit: Canva
Australia’s parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive on Thursday, closing a five-year argument that began when Meta worked out it could avoid paying for news by simply not carrying any. The new law removes that option.
Platforms with a significant search or social media service in Australia and more than A$250mn (about $178mn) in local advertising revenue now face a levy of 2.5% on that advertising revenue, whether or not they host a single news story. When the government first set out the scheme, the rate was 2.25%, and the list of names has grown since.
Meta, Alphabet’s Google, TikTok, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn are the companies in scope. LinkedIn was added in early August alongside the rate increase, which the government presented as a technical adjustment, but the industry did not.
The tax is not really meant to be collected, but it is designed as a price on refusing to negotiate, and a platform can reduce or eliminate it by striking commercial agreements with at least eight Australian news businesses.
Those agreements are then set against the bill at a favourable rate. Deals with large publishers count at 150% of their value, deals with small and medium-sized outlets at 200%, and no single deal can offset more than a quarter of a platform’s total liability, which is the clause that stops one very large cheque to one very large publisher from settling the whole thing.
Timing matters more than it usually does in tax law. Deals have to be finalised before the end of a platform’s financial reporting period to count against liability in that period, so the negotiating calendar is now set by each company’s own accounts rather than by the regulator.
Money that is not offset does not go to the treasury as general revenue. It is directed into a News Journalism Payments scheme intended to support publishers across the country, with the government saying the design deliberately favours smaller and regional outlets.
“Journalism is essential to strong democracy, holding people, businesses and governments to account,” said Anika Wells, the communications minister, in a statement on the bill’s passage. Assistant treasurer Daniel Mulino, who has handled the tax side, said Australian public interest journalism “matters to diverse communities and the nation”.
Mulino has been consistent about what the bill is aimed at. When the amended scheme was announced, he described the choice to tax advertising revenue rather than total revenue as reflecting “the part of the business that uses the news”, a concession the platforms had pushed for.
He has also been relaxed about the threat of departure, on the grounds that Australia is a very profitable market for the companies involved.
Meta has not tested that proposition, though it has argued the levy breaches the free trade agreement between Australia and the United States, a complaint it raised earlier this year and has not withdrawn.
One category of company is missing from the legislation entirely. AI firms are outside the scheme, despite training on and summarising the same journalism the law is designed to protect, and the government has not said whether it intends to revisit that.
There is also a grant layer sitting alongside the payments scheme. Under the design announced in early August, a share of what the levy raises is set aside for small publishers and news startups, the part of the industry that never had the leverage to negotiate with a platform in the first place.
Publishers, for their part, have spent two years watching the previous arrangement expire without a replacement.
The scheme’s ancestor, the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code, worked until it did not. It produced deals worth a reported A$200mn a year before Meta declined to renew them in 2024, at which point the code’s central weakness became clear: it could only be enforced against a platform that carried news.
Whether the new design holds will depend on what the platforms do in the next reporting period rather than on anything said in Canberra this week.
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