Meta has been blocking news in Canada for 2½ years, and the sky hasn’t fallen on Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s the fact Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his parliamentary colleagues should be staring at this week as they release their draft legislation for the News Bargaining Incentive, not the optimistic precedent of 2021, when Google and Facebook scrambled to sign cheques rather than face designation under the original code.
The world has changed in the past five years: Meta has called the bluff once already, and won.
I’ll admit I underestimated this when the Albanese government first floated this incentive scheme back in December 2024. The government said then that it would introduce a tax worth 2.25 per cent of tech firms’ revenue if they did not strike voluntary agreements with media companies to compensate them for news used on their platforms. For Meta, that would mean a levy in the region of $27 million to $34 million.
My assumption – and it was a common one among newsroom colleagues and executives at other tech companies at the time – was that Meta’s Canadian news ban was a temporary protest, the kind of corporate toddler tantrum that would eventually give way to commercial pragmatism.
Wanting something to work is not the same as believing it will, and the evidence from Canada is not encouraging.
Surely, the thinking went, a company that built its empire on likes, clicks and user engagement would not voluntarily strip away news completely and simply walk away.
It did. And the uncomfortable truth is that it’s been fine.
Less than 1 per cent of posts on Facebook in Australia contain a URL from a domestic news site, according to researcher Axel Bruns and his team. That explains why Meta walked away from its commercial deals with Australian publishers in March 2024, and why it removed news from Canada altogether when that country passed laws similar to Australia’s.
For Meta, it turns out, news is a content category that creates regulatory headaches without generating meaningful engagement. From the company’s perspective, why pay for a problem?
Meta has almost certainly done the maths and decided that any fine is cheaper than the alternative.
The Australian government’s response has been to write “must-carry” provisions into the redrafted framework, language designed to prevent Meta from doing in Australia what it has done in Canada. Must-carry, in this context, means legislation compelling Meta to host Australian news on its platforms whether it wants to or not.
This is where the policy gets interesting, and where it gets risky. Forcing a private company to host content it does not want to host raises constitutional questions that have not been seriously tested in Australian courts. It also invites a fight that the Trump administration is openly itching to have. The US-based Computer & Communications Industry Association has already branded the scheme a tax, as did Meta on Tuesday when it responded to Albanese’s announcement.
There is a fair counterargument here, and it deserves an honest hearing. Australia is not Canada. Our media market is more concentrated, our political consensus on supporting public-interest journalism is broader, and the original 2021 code did extract meaningful sums – more than $200 million – before Meta exited.
Google will deal, it always has. Back in 2021, before the original code even passed, the company was signing lump-sum agreements with Seven West, Nine and News Corp. The company has shown it would rather write cheques than block links because search is fundamentally about being the front door to the internet, and an internet without news links is a worse front door.
TikTok is the wildcard. It has never been a meaningful news distributor, and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has spent years trying to convince Western governments it’s a benign entertainment app. Expect quiet lobbying rather than a Meta-style stand-off: ByteDance cannot afford another front in its Western-government war.
When Meta blocks news, as I think it will, three things will happen: Publishers lose referral traffic, which hurts their commercial models. Misinformation fills the vacuum because the verified content that previously sat alongside conspiracy theories simply isn’t there any more. And the policy that prompted the ban becomes politically harder to reverse because walking it back looks like capitulation.
None of this has been catastrophic for Canada. None of it has been good, either.
The Albanese government is making a calculated wager that Meta will blink in Australia where it did not blink in Canada.
The wager rests on the assumption that the Australian market matters more to Meta’s global strategy, or that the must-carry provisions will hold up in court, or that Donald Trump will not make good on his tariff rhetoric. Possibly, all three.
That is a lot of assumptions stacked on top of each other.
I want this policy to work. Local journalism is genuinely under threat – newsrooms continue to shrink – and the case for platforms compensating the newsrooms whose work fuels their products is morally straightforward.
And I’ve always seen policies like this as being an imperfect solution to a very real problem – simply not enough people pay for quality journalism. Small and independent publishers in particular need better funding.
But wanting something to work is not the same as believing it will, and the evidence from Canada is not encouraging.
Meta has shown us, plainly, what it is willing to do. I won’t be surprised when it does it again.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.