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Facebook has said it will lift a controversial ban on Australian news pages, after the government agreed to amend a first global law that requires tech giants to pay media companies.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook said a compromise had been reached on key aspects of the law, which tech companies fiercely opposed.
“As a result of these changes, we can now work to further our investment in public interest journalism and restore news on Facebook to Australians in the coming days,” said Will Easton, Managing Director of Facebook Australia.
The social media firm sparked global outrage last week by hiding the news for its Australian users and inadvertently blocking a number of non-news Facebook pages linked to everything from cancer charities to emergency response services.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison had angrily accused Facebook of making the decision to “end its friendship” with Australia.
But the last-minute compromise, as parliament appears poised to pass the law this week, means that Facebook and Google, which were also targeted, will not be penalized as long as they reach deals with local media companies to pay for the news.
They will also get an additional two months to negotiate those deals.
“We are pleased that we were able to reach an agreement with the Australian government and appreciate the constructive discussions we have had,” Easton said.
Tech firms had fiercely opposed the legislation from the start, fearing it would create an international precedent that would threaten their business models.
Set precedents
“There is no question that Australia has been a proxy battle for the world,” Frydenberg said.
In particular, the companies opposed rules that made negotiations with media companies mandatory and gave an independent Australian arbitrator the right to enforce a settlement.
Google was keen to avoid creating a precedent that platforms should pay anyone for links, something that could render its flagship search engine down.
Facebook, which relies much less on the content of the news, had said that it was simply not worth being forced to pay for the news.
“We have reached an agreement that will allow us to support publishers of our choice, including small and local publishers,” said Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships.
Despite previous threats to withdraw its services from Australia due to legislation, Google had already softened its stance.
He negotiated millions of dollars worth of deals with a number of local media companies, including the two largest: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Nine Entertainment.
Facebook and Google still face the prospect of having to strike deals with the world’s media, as the European Union, Canada and other jurisdictions move to regulate the sector.
Since their emergence around the turn of the century, Google and Facebook have been largely unregulated and have become two of the largest and most profitable companies in the world.
But a series of scandals about misinformation, privacy breaches, data collection, and its virtual monopoly on online advertising has drawn the attention of watchdogs.
For every $ 100 Australian advertisers spend today, $ 49 goes to Google and $ 24 to Facebook, according to the country’s competition watchdog.
Critics of the law have said it is punishing successful companies and amounts to a grab for money by traditional media that are struggling but politically connected.
They also regret that there is no requirement in law that money earned by the Facebook and Google media companies be spent on expanding public interest journalism rather than simply increasing profits.
In Australia alone, thousands of journalism jobs and dozens of media outlets have been lost over the past decade as the industry watched the flow of advertising revenue to digital players.
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