Australia on Tuesday unveiled draft legislation that would impose a 2.25% charge on the Australian revenue of major digital platforms unless they strike commercial deals with local news publishers, reviving the country’s fight over who should pay for journalism in the platform era. The proposal, called the News Bargaining Incentive, is aimed at companies including Meta, Google and TikTok.
The government says the scheme is designed less as a revenue grab than as pressure. Platforms that sign qualifying agreements with publishers would be able to offset the charge, with reports saying the credits could be even more generous for deals involving smaller and regional outlets. Officials have framed the measure as a way to keep money flowing into public-interest reporting rather than letting platforms walk away from negotiations by simply dropping news links or downgrading news content.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has cast the plan in democratic terms, arguing that journalism creates real civic value and that large technology companies should not be able to profit from its distribution without contributing to its survival. According to the draft framework described in current coverage, the rules would apply only to very large platforms, with thresholds tied to both user reach and roughly A$250 million in annual Australian revenue.
The latest move is the next chapter in a long-running Australian campaign that began with the News Media Bargaining Code introduced in 2021. That code was meant to correct what Canberra saw as a sharp imbalance in bargaining power between publishers and global platforms. It initially produced payment deals, especially with Google and Meta, but officials later concluded the framework had a glaring weakness: a platform could blunt the pressure simply by withdrawing news. The newer incentive model is meant to close that loophole.
There is already pushback. Meta has described the proposal as a kind of digital services tax dressed up as media policy, while Google has argued it already supports Australian journalism through dozens of existing agreements and says the new approach unfairly targets a narrow group of companies. TikTok was also named in the proposal, though public reaction from the company appeared more limited in the first wave of reporting.
For Australia’s news industry, the measure could be significant. Reports on Tuesday said the mechanism could channel roughly A$200 million to A$250 million a year into journalism, with at least some of the distribution expected to reflect newsroom employment and support for smaller publishers. That matters in a media market where local and regional outlets have been under persistent financial strain, and where publishers have argued for years that platforms benefit from news content without bearing enough of its cost.
The government intends to introduce the legislation to parliament by July 2, according to current reports, setting up another closely watched test case for regulators around the world. Australia was first out of the gate with its 2021 code, and this revised model will likely be read far beyond Canberra as governments weigh how hard they can push Silicon Valley while still keeping platforms at the table.
