Facebook ‘tentatively friends’ Australia again as European publishers turn up heat on tech giant
FACEBOOK Inc is back at the negotiating table, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday, after it blocked news on its site in the country.
The tech giant’s abrupt decision to stop Australians sharing news on the site and strip the pages of news outlets also erased several state government and emergency department accounts, causing widespread anger.
The company has “tentatively friended us again”, Mr Morrison said. “What I’m pleased about is that Facebook is back at the table again.”
Facebook has publicly indicated no change in its opposition to a proposed law requiring social media platforms to pay for links to news content.
Australia’s Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he had spoken to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and further talks were expected this weekend.
The stand-off comes as Australia vows to press ahead with the landmark legislation, which could set a global precedent as countries including Canada express interest in taking similar action.
The Australian law, which would force Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google to reach commercial deals with Australian publishers or face compulsory arbitration, has cleared the lower house of parliament and is expected to be passed by the senate within days.
Simon Milner, Facebook’s Asia-Pacific policy director, was quoted yesterday telling the Sydney Morning Herald the company had three main objections to the legislation.
Facebook objects to being barred from discriminating between different news outlets that ask for money, to arbitration models that allow an independent body to select one payment over another, and to the obligation to enter commercial negotiations with Australian media companies, Mr Milner said.
Australia’s legislation is being widely watched overseas.
EU publishers are lobbying the European Parliament to copy parts of Australia’s proposed laws that would force Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to pay an agreed price for their content.
The publishers want EU lawmakers to force the tech giants into binding arbitration if they can’t agree on payments for snippets of articles shown on the platforms. They want a clause inserted in legislation proposed in December to rein in the big tech firms, known as the Digital Markets Act.
The industry sees an opportunity to press its case after Facebook’s news-sharing blackout in Australia backfired on the tech firm, resulting in an unprecedented show of strength directed at the social media giant. Publishers have haemorrhaged advertising revenue to digital platforms for decades.
“It has become clear that without the full force of an Australian-style approach, gatekeeper tech companies threaten to walk away from negotiations or exit markets entirely,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council (EPC), which represents publishers including Axel Springer and The New York Times. She said the EPC would support European lawmakers seeking to ensure platforms negotiate in good faith.
The EU already agreed a
separate copyright law to help publishers seek compensation from the platforms, after years of negotiations involving industry, officials and lawmakers. Andreas Schwab, the lead lawmaker in charge of the Digital Markets Act, said the copyright law protects people’s ability to share content while supporting quality journalism online.
For some publishers, the rules still don’t go far enough. France is one of the only countries so far to apply the copyright law, but its competition authority had to step in last year to force Google to pay for displaying news.
When France rolled out the law, Google started showing stripped-down French news search results that didn’t include previews of the articles. The search giant eventually reached a deal in January with a French publishers’ union that it will negotiate individual licence agreements.
The tech giants are still finding ways to “wriggle out” of their obligations to publishers even with the EU copyright rules in place, said Wout van Wijk, executive director of News Media Europe, an umbrella organisation representing national publisher associations.
“We would welcome a clause that mandates binding arbitration,” he said.
Facebook said Australia’s proposal of compulsory arbitration sets a precedent in which a government gets to decide who enters into content agreements and “how much the party that already receives value from the free service gets paid”, according to a blog post.
Google has also threatened to shut its search engine in Australia if the proposal becomes law, in particular because the rules would cover hyperlinks to news articles.
The company is hoping recent deals it has struck with some news organisations will be enough to head off a fresh regulatory assault in Europe and elsewhere.
As part of its product called Google News Showcase, the search giant has started paying select media outlets, including those in Germany, the UK, Australia and Argentina, to display articles on its news app and has set aside $1bn to cover the programme’s first three years.