The Australian government yesterday said that it would tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations.
The tax would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than A$250 million (US$160 million) a year in revenue from Australia, Australian Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Australian Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said.
They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance (字節跳動), the Chinese owner of TikTok.
Photo: AP
Officials said that X would likely not be affected because its domestic revenue was too small.
The tax would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations.
The size of the tax is not clear, but the government aims to make sharing revenue with media organizations the cheaper option.
“The real objective ... is not to raise revenue — we hope not to raise any revenue. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.
The move comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian news publishers for their content.
A previous government introduced in 2021 laws called the News Media Bargaining Code that forced tech giants to strike revenue-sharing deals with Australian media companies or face fines of 10 percent of their Australian revenue.
Meta said in a statement that the current law was flawed and the US company continued to have “concerns about charging one industry to subsidize another.”
“The proposal fails to account for the realities of how our platforms work, specifically that most people don’t come to our platforms for news content and that news publishers voluntarily choose to post content on our platforms because they receive value from doing so,” the statement said.
Google has struck revenue-sharing agreements with more than 80 Australian news companies and has committed to renewing them, but has raised doubts about the government’s new approach.
“The government’s introduction of a targeted tax risks the ongoing viability of commercial deals with news publishers in Australia,” it said in a statement.
TikTok said that its users do not seek news.
“As an entertainment platform, TikTok has never been the go to place for news. We will actively engage in the consultation process and look forward to hearing more details,” it said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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