Facebook Reaches Deal With Australia to Restore News -- 2nd Update
February 23 2021 - 4:24AM
Dow Jones News
By Mike Cherney
Facebook Inc. reached a deal with the Australian government to
restore news pages to the social media company's platform,
following a five-day hiatus because of a disagreement over payment
for content.
Facebook removed news from its platform in Australia last week,
as legislation that would effectively require Facebook and Alphabet
Inc.'s Google to pay traditional media companies for content worked
its way through the country's parliament. The legislation is being
widely watched globally and could offer a model for other countries
to compel tech giants to pay for content.
Facebook got some changes to the legislation as part of the
deal. That includes requiring an additional round of negotiation
with media companies before binding arbitration kicks in, as well
as more acknowledgment of any deals Facebook reaches with
publishers on its own, a government statement and government
officials said Tuesday. In return, Facebook planned to restore news
pages to its platform in Australia in the coming days, the
statement said.
In a news conference, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told him that the company
intends to strike commercial deals with Australian media
organizations to pay for content. It did that later Tuesday, when
Australian television and newspaper company Seven West Media Ltd.
said it agreed to provide news to Facebook, though it didn't
immediately provide any details of the deal.
"There's no doubt that Australia has been a proxy battle for the
world," Mr. Frydenberg said Tuesday. "Facebook and Google have not
hidden the fact that they know that the eyes of the world are on
Australia."
Facebook said Tuesday that it is satisfied that the changes to
the legislation address its main concerns, including that previous
versions didn't fully recognize the value Facebook provides to news
publishers by sending traffic to their websites. Campbell Brown,
the vice president of global news partnerships at Facebook, said
the Australian government clarified that Facebook would retain the
ability to decide whether news appears on its platform.
"It's always been our intention to support journalism in
Australia and around the world," she said. "We'll continue to
invest in news globally and resist efforts by media conglomerates
to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the
true value exchange between publishers and platforms like
Facebook."
Both Google and Facebook have in the past been willing to pay
for news in certain contexts. Google, which initially opposed the
legislation and had threatened to shut down its search engine in
Australia, also recently agreed to new deals to pay some publishers
for content, including News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal
publisher Dow Jones & Co.
A spokesman for News Corp's Australia subsidiary declined to
comment on the new Facebook deal. Google also declined to
comment.
Nine Entertainment Co., the publisher of the Sydney Morning
Herald, said it is pleased that the government and Facebook found a
compromise that will bring the tech giant back to the negotiating
table.
"We look forward to constructive discussions resuming," a Nine
spokesperson said.
Facebook's removal of news from its platform caused an uproar in
Australia, including from consumers. Some digital-media experts
said Facebook's move, without any immediate advance notice,
underscored the power it holds over the information that users
receive.
Pages belonging to some government agencies and community
groups--such as the country's weather service, local health
agencies and even domestic-violence hotlines--were initially taken
down, too. Facebook later said that was inadvertent but that it
targeted an array of content because the definition of news in the
legislation was broad.
There are signs that Facebook's response in Australia is giving
a push to new regulatory efforts overseas. Lawmakers in the U.S.
and U.K. criticized the news ban. In Canada, one minister said his
government would move forward on similar legislation. In Europe on
Monday, news publishers and Microsoft Corp., which had previously
said it supported the Australian legislation, called for a
mechanism similar to the Australian legislation to be enacted
there.
In Australia, the legislation would require tech companies and
news publishers to submit to binding arbitration if a deal can't be
reached on payment for content. Among the changes announced Tuesday
is a mediation process that would occur before final
arbitration.
The legislation also requires the Australian treasurer to
designate which tech companies the new regulations would apply to.
The changes include requiring the treasurer, when deciding whether
to make a designation, to take into account whether a tech company
has contributed to the Australian news industry through commercial
agreements.
Australian officials have previously said that the purpose of
the new regulations is to encourage the tech companies and media
outlets to strike deals on their own, following complaints from
media companies that the digital platforms had so much market power
that there was no incentive for them to negotiate. Mr. Frydenberg
has pointed to Google's recent deals with media companies as
evidence the new regulations are working even before being passed
into law.
Facebook previously said the proposed law misunderstands the
relationship between publishers and tech companies, and that it had
little choice but to restrict news sharing rather than accept a law
that ignores reality. Other business groups and some computer
scientists have also raised concerns about the law.
Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 23, 2021 04:09 ET (09:09 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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