Facebook and Australia have just struggled over a bill to make digital giants pay to take news from local publishers. A situation that may be well known in Canada in the near future….
Small reminder of the origin of the problem
The conflict comes from a bill, approved this week by the Australian House of Representatives and debated in the Senate early next week (and which should therefore be adopted very soon).
The latter obliges digital companies, Google and Facebook in this case, to pay the Australian media in return for taking their content. If the digital giants fail to establish trade agreements with Australian publishers, mandatory arbitration will be imposed, and significant penalties will be expected. What Canberra calls the “binding code of conduct”.
Agreements signed with Google
The two American GAFA opted for very different strategies. Google lent itself to the game and, in mid-February, the search engine had already reached an agreement with 7 press publishers, as part of the deployment of Google News Showcase in Australia, including Rupert Murdoch’s group, News Corp. (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times, The Sun or even The Australian). According to Le Monde, it would have committed the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars annually.
For Facebook, the reaction was quite different and slightly more… hostile. The social network explains that its operation is not the same as the Mountain View firm:
“Our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with the news. Google search is inextricably linked to information and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content. On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook because it allows them to sell more subscriptions, expand their audience and increase their advertising revenue,” indicates William Easton, Executive Director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, in a press release.
As a result, on Thursday February18, Facebook blocked access to pages and to the sharing of local and international media articles from Australia until further notice! A behaviour that is not unlike that of… Google, that closed its Google News service in Spain in 2014 following a similar problem.
The multinational hit hard. Perhaps even a little too much. Among the collateral victims, we find official relief pages such as that of the firefighters of the State of New South Wales, that of the Children’s Hospital of Melbourne, those of organizations for human rights, fighting domestic violence or helping the homeless, who have disappeared from Australian radar.
A compromised reached
This of course caused an outcry on the island-continent.
“Facebook’s actions to end its friendship with Australia today, by cutting essential health information and emergency services, are as arrogant as they are disappointing”, said Prime Minister Scott Morrison. “We will not be intimidated.”
However, the tension has dropped a notch this Tuesday, February 23. In the coming days, Facebook announced the lifting of the blocking of the targeted pages. A compromise – undisclosed – was reached with the government.
“We can now work to continue our investment in public interest journalism and restore information on Facebook to Australians in the coming days”, indicated the Regional Director of Social Network in a statement.
Why does this matter beyond Australia?
The story could have ended there and not exceeded the limits of the Indian Ocean. But it turns out that this movement to regulate the actors of the “Big Tech” is growing worldwide.
Since January 2021, Facebook has been paying British publishers in its new Facebook News Portal. In France, Google signed an agreement with publishers at the same time.
This is enough to give ideas and sound like a warning to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Steven Guilbeault, who is preparing a bill to that effect, scheduled for next spring. He called Facebook’s reaction in Australia “very irresponsible”. A taste of a future showdown?
