Meta has launched a scathing attack on Australia’s proposed News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), branding it a “discriminatory tax” and warning it could breach the Australia-US free trade agreement.
To be funded by a proposed 2.25 per cent charge on the tech giants’ “widest possible revenue base” – including “products that have no relation whatsoever to news content” – Meta argues the NBI, which will apply to gross revenues and not profits, “is really a digital services tax.”
By targeting platforms with millions of Australian users and over $250 million in local revenues, Meta said, the levy “applies only to three foreign companies, penalising them for bringing new products and technologies to Australia while giving [competitors] a free pass.”
“It is a tax on innovation dressed up as media policy.”
Meta outlined its concerns in its formal submission to the NBI consultation, weeks after the April release of draft legislation for the News Media Bargaining (Administration) Act 2026 and consequent changes, and NMB Charge Act 2026 outlining proposed funds distribution.
The laws represent a significant new phase in the ongoing dispute between the government and major tech companies in a process that dates back to a 2018 ACCC report into Google, Facebook and Australian news and ads that recommended tighter controls.
Meta briefly wiped Australian news in 2021 to protest the resulting News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), then refused to renew its NMBC deals in early 2024 before permanently closing the service in April 2024, weeks after the government moved to force its compliance.
At that point, the company said it “cannot solve the long-standing issues facing the news industry” – and claimed in its submission that daily Australian active users of Facebook News had already dropped by over 80 per cent before it pulled the plug.
The decline was “a clear signal of where audience preferences had shifted,” Meta said, claiming “people come to our platforms for connection, entertainment, and creator content, not to click on news articles.”
Yet that can only be partly true, with Meta also acknowledging that Australian publishers “voluntarily share content – free of charge – on Meta’s platforms because they derive real commercial benefits” through referral traffic, ad growth and advertising revenue.
Variations on a theme
Meta has long opposed evolving rules that became Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code – which US lobbyists last year called “discriminatory” a year after Meta attracted the wrath of Parliament by walking away from its earlier NMBC agreements.
At the time, former Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the government “will not be held ransom by multinational companies who blatantly threaten to avoid … [abiding] by our laws.”
With the NBI now on the way to being enshrined into law to which Meta says it is “vehemently opposed”, the company also claims the draft legislation “plainly violates” the Free Trade Agreement.
That FTA, the company argues, “commits Australia to grant American companies ‘treatment no less favourable’ than Australian peers in cross border services, investments, and digital products.”
“In all three instances, this is clearly not the case when it comes to the NBI.”
A bevy of opinions
It’s an echo of recent US complaints that the NBI amounts to “foreign extortion” and threatened retribution from the Trump administration over laws the government has said are designed to “incentivise digital platforms to renew or enter into commercial deals”.
Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) research fellow Margaret Chambers, for one, shares industry concerns and warned the proposed NBI “represents problematic market interference that does not address the fundamental shift in how Australians consume news.”
It “empowers the federal government to arbitrarily choose which businesses will subsidise others,” she said, pushing big tech “to subsidise traditional media outlets and forcing artificial commercial relationships that do not reflect actual consumer value or demand.”
“The proposal clearly constitutes a tax…. that risks undermining trading relations with the US.”
Meanwhile, UTS Centre for Media Transition co-director Monica Attard, argued “there is a more effective approach” including repealing the NMBC, imposing the mandatory levy on digital platforms and distributing it to “eligible news media businesses via an arm’s length body”.
The Law Council of Australia has warned the criteria for NBI inclusion are “unnecessary rigid” and don’t provide “sufficient flexibility to capture future market developments”, recommending the law sunset after 3 years so AI developments can be reassessed.
Industry body the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) is far more positive, saying it “strongly welcomes” the draft NBI legislation – in particular, proposed distribution of the funds on the basis of the number of journalist full-time equivalents they employ.
“There is a strong public interest justification in the delivery of funds to support journalists’ jobs,” the MEAA said, urging controls to ensure funds raised by the NBI go not to executive bonuses or investor returns, but are “spent on the production of public interest journalism”.
