Australia closes Meta's 'no news, no payment' loophole

Australia closes Meta's 'no news, no payment' loophole - Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: Alibaba’s Qwen LLM takes global download top spot

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at Australia's latest move to make big tech contribute to the cost of journalism, Qwen taking the LLM top spot, and Taiwan's AI-boosted economic surge.

Australia has effectively closed a "no news, no payment" loophole that allowed big tech companies to circumvent its 2021 News Media Bargaining Code.

That original code was designed to force big tech and social media companies to share some of the revenues generated from news content from advertising with the publishers that produce it in order to support Australian journalism, and to an extent it has been successful, with dozens of deals struck between media groups and tech platforms. However, there was a problem: Meta responded by simply removing news from Facebook.

This week parliament introduced a replacement that plugs this loophole. The News Bargaining Incentive imposes a financial levy on platforms of a certain size unless they reach qualifying agreements with publishers- whether they are carrying news or not. It applies to companies operating a "significant" social media or search service in Australia and generating more than A$250 million in Australian advertising revenue, which will bring Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok in scope.

In what the Australian government called "an important day ⁠for Australian news businesses and Australian journalism," these platforms will need to reach an agreement with at least eight different publishers or pay a levy of 2.5% of their advertising revenues. The value any deals with publishers would be subtracted from that levy.In June, while the measure was being debated, Meta described it as "grossly unfair", and a targeted, discriminatory measure aimed at a handful of predominantly US companies. It was backed up in this assessment by US tech lobbyists who called it "economically incoherent".

Similar objections were heard previously when other states such as Canada and New Zealand introduced comparable measures to rebalance the relationship between tech platforms and local media, with Google describing one as a "link tax" and threatening not to link to certain sites.

Governments around the world will be watching the outcome of Australia's move with significant interest. The country has become a test case twice: first with the 2021 bargaining code, and now with a more watertight levy-backed model. If the new system manages to secure funding without triggering another round of service withdrawals it could be seen as a template for others to adopt.