A series of deals signed by Facebook parent company Meta three years ago with Australian media companies worth about $70 million annually are set to come to an end, with the tech giant reportedly refusing to restart negotiations on these agreements.

In February 2021, the News Media Bargaining Code came into effect, aiming to force tech companies, primarily Meta and Google, to negotiate content sharing deals with media firms to pay them for the use of their content on their platforms.

Under the scheme, a company can be designated under the code, meaning they can be forced to enter into arbitration to decide on such a revenue-sharing deal.

Three years later, no company has been designated by the federal government under the scheme, but a flurry of deals have been made.

According to Treasury data, Meta signed 13 deals with media outlets for the use of their content in 2021, worth about $70 million, while Google signed 23 deals.

The combined deals are estimated to be worth more than $200 million per year for Australian media firms.

Many of these deals signed by Meta ran for three years and are set to come to an end at the conclusion of the current financial year.

Despite this being only three months away, Meta is reportedly refusing to discuss new deals with publishers, putting the ongoing funding at risk, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said the government is ready and able to designate these tech companies under the code to force them to come to the negotiation table.

“The government remains committed to supporting the news media sector,” Jones said.

“We are in the process of meeting with platforms and publishers, and expect negotiations to happen in good faith.

“But we have made it very clear that we have powers under the code. We will use them if we have to.”

Some of the deals signed by Google are understood to run for five years rather than three.

A success to date

Former ACCC chair Rod Sims, who led the competition watchdog when the bargaining code was introduced, said that the deals signed by media companies are worth about $1 billion over four years.

“I expect the deals will get rolled over and I can’t see why they wouldn’t be,” Sims told the Sydney Morning Herald.

“But if they’re not, then that’s a great loss to journalism in Australia. We need that model to continue so that journalism gets a fair payment for the content that is of enormous benefit to Facebook and Google.”

Josh Frydenberg, who was Treasurer at the time and oversaw the introduction of the code, said it is a “blueprint for future negotiations”.

Late last year, the Labor government agreed to all five recommendations made by Treasury after the code’s first year of operation.

These included giving the ACCC more powers to gather information about the agreements signed, and mandated reporting requirements to capture new tech platforms under the code.

The Treasury report found that the bargaining code has been a “success to date” and that the government should consider extending it to other tech firms.

The government is reportedly looking at including social media TikTok under the scheme.

The code proved highly controversial when it was being debated in Parliament, with Meta and Google railing against its introduction.

At the time, Google threatened to shut off its Search product in Australia, saying the bargaining code presented an “untenable risk” to its local operations.
Meta took things even further and briefly removed all news content for its users in Australia.

This is a move it repeated recently in Canada after the government there announced a similar law requiring tech giants to pay news publishers for content found through Google Search and Facebook.

Last week, Google experimented with removing the News tab entirely for some users, as Nieman Lab reported.

This was done as part of testing “different ways to show filters on Search” leading to a “small subset of users being temporarily unable to access some of them”.

A spokesperson Google said this test is now finished and the company has no plans to actually remove the News tab.