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SYDNEY (AFP): A leading publisher called Google and other tech giants on Thursday (May 14) to pay Australian media about $ 400k (RM1.7bil) per year under a mandatory code of conduct mandated by government.
Australia last month announced plans to force Google, Facebook and other Internet companies to share advertising revenue from news content featured on their platforms.
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In a closely watched initiative worldwide, the government will reveal details of the mandatory payments in July as part of a code of conduct for tech giants’ dealings with the media.
The president of Nine Entertainment, Australia’s second-largest media company, argued on Thursday that the payment should represent 10 percent of advertising revenue for technology companies in Australia, estimated by the government to be about A $ 6bil ( RM16.9bil) per year.
Peter Costello said that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) had determined that 10 percent of technology companies’ revenues were derived from advertising on news content.
“So if you apply those numbers, Google and Facebook are withdrawing around A $ 600k in advertising revenue … which might otherwise have been or should have been going to the media,” he said in an interview with Nine’s Australian Financial. Review. Newspaper.
“Basically they are using the product created by the news organizations without paying for it,” he said. “In fact, use it to increase your own income and take the publicity that would otherwise support that journalism.”
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The Australian government said it was enforcing the code of conduct after months of negotiations over a voluntary agreement with Google, Facebook and other companies that failed to reach an agreement.
Google and Facebook protested the measure and asked to continue negotiations. Both companies also insist that they have invested millions of dollars in initiatives to help Australia’s struggling news industry.
‘Industrial solution’
Costello dismissed the need for further conversations and said the best way to tackle the problem is “an industry solution, where you sit down and try to estimate the value that Google and Facebook get from using this material. We think it is At $ 600 thousand a year. “
“These are trillion-dollar corporations, not that it’s going to undermine their profitability if they had to pay A $ 600,000 in copyright revenue in Australia, and I hope they see it that way,” he said.
Google and Facebook have had a huge impact on Australia’s news industry, capturing two-thirds of online advertising spending.
In response to falling earnings, the Australian media has cut 20 percent of jobs in the past six years.
The crisis has only deepened in the advertising and economic recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has already forced the closure of many smaller news publishers.
If Australia succeeds in its efforts to secure more ad revenue streams for publishers, it would be the first country to do so.
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Australia’s new regulations will also cover data sharing, and the classification and display of news content, to be implemented through binding dispute resolution and sanctions mechanisms.
It is estimated that 17 million Australians use Facebook every month and spend an average of 30 minutes on the platform per day, while 98 percent of Australian mobile searches use Google. – AFP
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