Andrea Carson
Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy La Trobe University
Jonathan Heawood
executive director Public Interest News Foundation
Misha Ketchell
editor The Conversation Australia and New Zealand
Khadija Patel
head of programmes The International Fund for Public Interest Media
Anya Schiffrin
School of International and Public Affairs Columbia University
Who is winning the ongoing battle between platforms and publishers? This panel delves into the global impact of the world-first Australian News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) introduced in 2021, examining its effectiveness and influence in places as wide-reaching as the US, Canada, UK, Brazil, and South Africa. Experts scrutinize the divergent strategies adopted by Google and Meta in response to the Australian legislation, shedding light on the difficulties of platform regulation and its outcomes, both positive and contested, two years post-implementation.
Drawing on their work and experiences, they discuss how Google and Meta initially adopted in other countries the same playbook as in Australia in 2020. Both companies have voiced strong opposition to the new Canadian law, Online News Act ‘Bill C-18’, with Meta acting on its threat and withdrawing Canadian news links from Facebook. Google also opposed the law, but at the end of 2023, at the final hour agreed to keep news on its platform in exchange for annual payments to news outlets worth approximately $100 million. The panel explores how the Australian Code shapes global thinking about platform regulation, and its challenges so far as current deals begin to expire in 2024.
The panel explores critical debates by diverse actors calling for transparency and fair compensation for news content. Our expert moderator (with senior economists) has calculated that newsrooms are being shortchanged. Anya Schiffrin estimates that in the US alone, a fair price for news would be more than 12 billion USD a year. This panel explains why this is so, and if achieving it is possible.
