Australia plans to tax digital platforms that don't pay for news
The Australian government says it will tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations
MELBOURNE, Australia — The Australian government said Thursday it will tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations.
The tax would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than 250 million Australian dollars ($160 million) a year in revenue from Australia, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.
They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.
The tax would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations. The size of the tax is not clear. But the government aims to make sharing revenue with media organizations the cheaper option.
«The real objective… is not to raise revenue — we hope not to raise any revenue. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.
The move comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian news publishers for their content.
A previous government introduced in 2021 laws called the News Media Bargaining Code that forced tech giants to strike revenue-sharing deals with Australian media companies or face fines of 10% of their Australian revenue.
Meta said in a statement the current law was flawed and the U.S. company continued to have “concerns about charging one industry to subsidise another.”
»The proposal fails to account for the realities of how our platforms work, specifically that most
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