Facebook threatens it will block news-sharing in Oz

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has threatened to block Australian publishers and individuals from sharing news stories on its platform in reaction to an Australian measure that could require it to compensate media organisations for its use of their stories.

The social network said the Australian move would force it to pay arbitrary and theoretically unlimited sums for information that makes up only a small fraction of its service.

The measure would force Facebook to choose between “either removing news entirely or accepting a system that lets publishers charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits,” the company’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Will Easton, wrote in a blog post. “No business can operate that way.” Campbell Brown, a former NBC and CNN anchor who is Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships, said the cutoff threat “has nothing to do with our ongoing global commitment to journalism.”

Brown’s post, which cited a individual Facebook programmes intended to support news organisations, was titled “Our Continued Commitment to Journalism.” The threat came after a consultation period on the draft law ended last week and the Australian government gets to work on its final wording.

Australian communications minister Paul Fletcher declined to say if he thought Facebook would make good on its threat. “It’s far from unprecedented for big tech companies to make heavy-handed threats,” he said. “We will continue with our thorough and careful process, our public policy process, based upon the facts, based upon giving all stakeholders the chance to put their views.”

Google had issued an open letter that cast the proposed law as a potential threat to individual privacy and a burden that would degrade the quality of its search and YouTube video services, but did not threaten a cutoff.

Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the laws would create “a more sustainable media landscape.”