Australia’s Big Gamble: The News Media Bargaining Code and the Responses From Google and Facebook

Abstract

Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms, specifically Google and Facebook”; following a period of consultation that saw substantial public relations campaigning from Google, Facebook, and other content platforms to question the aims and effectiveness of the proposed code, the NMBC bill was sent to federal Parliament in December 2020. Google and Facebook both threatened to remove their services from Australia, or remove Australian news content from their platforms, if the NMBC passed in its original form. Such threats were regarded by some of the NMBC’s proponents as blatant attempts at “bullying” the Australian government to water down the Code, and in pushing ahead with the debate of the NMBC bill in the Australian Parliament the government essentially sought to call the platforms’ bluff – yet in the morning of 18 February 2021, Facebook followed through on its threats and both removed all content from the Facebook pages of Australian news outlets (and from those of other actors mistakenly classified as providing news), and banned any domestic or international users from publishing or accessing any posts that contained links to Australian news sites. The ban remained in force until 26 February, when urgent negotiations between Facebook and the Australian federal government produced a preliminary solution to the crisis. The Code finally became law on 2 March 2021. This panel reviews these turbulent developments. In combination, the four papers on this panel present a comprehensive and multifaceted picture of the News Media Bargaining Code, its context, and implications.

Chasing the Mainstream: Corporate Social Advocacy and Online Content Governance

“…Current efforts to integrate online content moderation into state regulatory regimes as part of a transnational "techlash" have raised critical questions about civil liberties, efficacy, and the absence of regulation addressing common carriage, interoperability, or data collection (Hill & Shtern, forthcoming; Puppis & Winseck, 2020). Other examples, such as Australia's News Media Bargaining Code, were criticized as tweaks that served established media players without addressing fundamental questions of either the business model for journalism or platform power over content distribution (Bruns, et al, 2021). Generally, while these efforts have been welcomed as a change from accepting digital platforms as lawless (Suzor, 2019), governors (Klonick, 2017), or online "custodians" (Gillespie, 2018), there remains a criticism that state interventions target elements of online content while accepting market power and individualization over important democratic values, protecting the "common sense" of platform function while asserting the power of the state (Cammaerts & Mansell, 2020).…”

Chasing the Mainstream: Corporate Social Advocacy and Online Content Governance

“…Current efforts to integrate online content moderation into state regulatory regimes as part of a transnational "techlash" have raised critical questions about civil liberties, efficacy, and the absence of regulation addressing common carriage, interoperability, or data collection (Hill & Shtern, forthcoming; Puppis & Winseck, 2020). Other examples, such as Australia's News Media Bargaining Code, were criticized as tweaks that served established media players without addressing fundamental questions of either the business model for journalism or platform power over content distribution (Bruns, et al, 2021). Generally, while these efforts have been welcomed as a change from accepting digital platforms as lawless (Suzor, 2019), governors (Klonick, 2017), or online "custodians" (Gillespie, 2018), there remains a criticism that state interventions target elements of online content while accepting market power and individualization over important democratic values, protecting the "common sense" of platform function while asserting the power of the state (Cammaerts & Mansell, 2020).…”

The News Media Bargaining Code: Impacts on Australian journalism one year on

“…The NMBC has been positioned as a move away from 'reactive regulatory policy' (Bossio et al, 2022), such as recent governmental pressure on platforms to curb disinformation flows on the platform in response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic (Rodrigues & Xu, 2020). Instead, the NMBC is an example of the increasing number of more interventionist policy approaches to platform regulation; from the European Union's focus on application of copyright law (Wilding, 2022), to the more recent focus on competition law to remedy perceived market imbalances, as taken by governments in Australia, Canada and South Africa, amongst others (Bailo et al, 2021).…”