Australia – Page 2 – Wall Street Observer

Undeterred by Facebook news blackout, Australia commits to content law

Posted on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 3:31pmFri, Feb 19, 2021, 3:40pm by Reuters

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison vowed on Friday to press ahead with laws to force Facebook Inc to pay news outlets for content, saying he had received support from world leaders after the social media giant blacked out all media.

Facebook stripped the pages of domestic and foreign news outlets for Australians and blocked users of its platform from sharing any news content on Thursday, saying it had been left with no choice ahead of the new content laws.

The move, which also erased several state government and emergency department accounts, as well as nonprofit charity sites, caused widespread outrage.

Morrison, who blasted Facebook on its own platform for “unfriending” Australia, said on Friday the leaders of Britain, Canada, France and India had shown support.

“There is a lot of world interest in what Australia is doing,” Morrison told reporters in Sydney.

“That is why I invite … Facebook to constructively engage because they know that what Australia will do here is likely to be followed by many other Western jurisdictions.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said late on Thursday his country would adopt the Australian approach as it crafts its own legislation in coming months.

The Australian law, which will force Facebook and Google to reach commercial deals with Australian publishers or face compulsory arbitration, has already been cleared by the federal lower house and is expected to be passed by the Senate within the next week.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he had spoken to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a second time following the news blackout.

“We talked through their remaining issues and agreed our respective teams would work through them immediately. We’ll talk again over the weekend,” Frydenberg said in a tweet.

In its statement announcing the move in Australia, Facebook said the Australian law “misunderstood” its value to publishers. Frydenberg earlier told the Australian Broadcasting Corp that “there is something much bigger here at stake than just one or two commercial deals. This is about Australia’s sovereignty”.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc owned Google had campaigned together against the laws with both threatening to withdraw key services from Australia if the laws took effect.

Google, however, announced a host of preemptive licencing deals over the past week, including a global agreement with News Corp.

Facebook restored some government pages later on Thursday, but several charity, nonprofit and even neighbourhood groups remained dark.

WEB TRAFFIC SLUMPS

Facebook’s move had an immediate impact on traffic to Australian newsites, according to early data from New York-based analytics firm Chartbeat.

Total traffic to the Australian news sites from various platforms fell from the day before the ban by around 13% within the country and by about 30% outside the country, the Chartbeat data showed.

Similarly, traffic to the Australian news sites from Facebook alone plummeted from around 21% to about 2% within Australia, and from around 30% to about 4% outside the country.

News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller, testifying at an unrelated parliamentary hearing, confirmed the impact but said the number of Australians visiting the company’s websites directly had risen.

“Definitely referral traffic was nonexistent … while at the same time direct traffic to our websites was up in double digits,” he told the inquiry.

Miller also suggested antitrust regulator the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) should scrutinise Facebook’s move.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye and Renju Jose; Editing by Sam Holmes and Jane Wardell)

U.S. sees Facebook dispute as a matter between companies and Australia -State Dept

Posted on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 3:31pmFri, Feb 19, 2021, 3:40pm by Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States considers Australia’s dispute with Facebook Inc a business negotiation between private companies and the Australian government, the U.S. State Department said on Friday.

U.S. ally Australia is locked in a pitched battle with Facebook. The U.S.-based social media giant blocked news feeds and other pages – including those of charities, and health and emergency services – as part of a dispute over a proposed law that would require Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google to pay news outlets whose links drive traffic to their platforms, or agree on a price through arbitration.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison vowed on Friday to press ahead with the law, saying he had received support from world leaders.

Asked at a news briefing whether that included support from the United States, State Department spokesman Ned Price told a regular news briefing, “This is a business negotiation between multiple private companies and the Australian government. Any questions on the status and implications of private business decisions should be directed towards those companies.”

(Reporting by Simon Lewis, Humeyra Pamuk, Daphne Psaledakis and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)

Exclusive: Facebook and Google could lose bargaining power under upcoming U.S. bill to help news outlets

Posted on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, 2:06pmFri, Feb 19, 2021, 2:08pm by Reuters

By Diane Bartz and Helen Coster

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Bipartisan members of Congress plan to introduce a bill in coming weeks to make it easier for smaller news organizations to negotiate with Big Tech platforms, said Rep. Ken Buck, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.

The U.S. bill would be introduced at a time when Australia is in a pitched battle with Facebook. The social media giant blocked news feeds and other pages – including those of charities, and health and emergency services – as part of a dispute over a proposed law that would require it and Google to pay news outlets whose links drive traffic to their platforms, or agree on a price through arbitration.

Buck, who was named the ranking member this month, told Reuters on Thursday the panel would bring out a series of antitrust bills and the first one in the coming weeks would allow smaller news organizations to negotiate collectively with Facebook and Alphabet’s Google.

Social media companies use news to attract customers and have been accused by news publishers of not sharing enough advertising revenue with them. The legislation could boost sales in the struggling news business.

While Facebook has fought publishers, Google has struck deals with them in France, Australia and other countries.

Google announced this week that it had agreed to a global deal with News Corp that involved “significant payments” to the news organization, in one of the most extensive deals of its kind.

Smaller publishers using Google’s ad sales technology have for years griped about their bigger competitors getting more favorable revenue-sharing deals from the search giant.

The news industry is undeniably struggling, with employment at U.S. newspapers down by half since 2008 amid tumbling advertising revenue and changing media habits, according to data from Pew Research.

Buck said the expected legislation would be similar to a 2019 bill co-sponsored by panel chair Rep. David Cicilline which would have allowed small publishers to band together to negotiate with big gatekeepers like Facebook and Google without facing antitrust scrutiny.

Facebook, Google and Cicilline’s office did not respond to requests for comment after working hours.

That bill specified that only small publishers could take advantage of the group negotiation.

“What publishers have experienced is that platforms go to them one by one, make them sign NDAs and try to optimize per publisher without publishers being able to compare notes,” said David Chavern, president and chief executive officer of the News Media Alliance, an industry trade group that is promoting the bill.

“Big national publishers probably have the capacity to get their own deals. If you look at smaller publishers, the only way to get some fair value is if they act together.”

In October, the antitrust subcommittee’s majority report detailed abuses by tech giants such as Google and Facebook. In his own report, Buck and three fellow Republicans expressed interest in some changes in antitrust law aimed at strengthening enforcers.

Buck said he wanted the focus to remain on the tech giants. “The biggest threat to the free market economy is big tech and it (potential legislation) should be fairly tightly focused on that,” he said.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington and Helen Coster in New York; Additional reporting by Paresh Dave in Oakland, Ca.; Editing by Chris Sanders and Lincoln Feast)

Facebook ‘unfriends’ Australia: uproar as news pages go dark

Posted on Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 3:40pmThu, Feb 18, 2021, 3:53pm by Reuters

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Facebook faced backlash from publishers and politicians on Thursday after blocking news feeds in Australia in a surprise escalation of a dispute with the government over a law to require it to share revenue from news.

Facebook wiped out pages from Australian state governments and charities as well as from domestic and international news organisations, three days before the launch of a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Though the measure was limited to Australia, European publishers along with British and Canadian politicians described it as an attempt to put pressure on governments that might consider similar measures.

“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison wrote on his own Facebook page.

“These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behaviour of Big Tech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, who is drafting legislation to make the platforms pay for using media content, said Facebook’s move was “highly irresponsible.”

“It won’t deter us from moving ahead,” he said in remarks to reporters.

The dispute centres on a planned Australian law that would require Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google to reach deals to pay news outlets whose links drive traffic to their platforms, or agree on a price through arbitration.

A Facebook spokeswoman said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had “a constructive call with Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and again expressed our disappointment with the proposed law.” She said Facebook would continue to engage with the governments on amendments to the law.

Facebook said it had blocked a wide swathe of pages because the draft law did not clearly define news content. It said its commitment to combat misinformation had not changed, and it would restore pages that were taken down by mistake.

“As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” a company spokesman said.

Facebook used its machine learning tools to identify news on the site to enforce the Australia action that blocked everything from news and government websites to its own site in Australia at one point.

Benedict Evans, a digital media analyst and former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said the argument that Facebook would willingly pay for news article links on its platform if not for its dominance is misguided, and no other website pays publishers to link stories.

“There is willful blindness to this logic,” Evans wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. No-one has ever paid to link, regardless of their market power.”

The head of the British parliamentary committee overseeing the media industry, Julian Knight, said the message was aimed far beyond Australia.

“This action – this bully boy action – that they’ve undertaken in Australia will I think ignite a desire to go further amongst legislators around the world,” Knight told Reuters.

“I think they’re almost using Australia as a test of strength for global democracies as to whether or not they wish to impose restrictions on the way in which they do business,” he said. “So, we’re all behind Australia in my view.”

News publishers saw Facebook’s tactics as evidence that the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, cannot be trusted as the gatekeeper for their industry.

Henry Faure Walker, chairman of Britain’s News Media Association industry group, said banning news during a global pandemic was “a classic example of a monopoly power being the schoolyard bully, trying to protect its dominant position with scant regard for the citizens and customers it supposedly serves.”

The head of Germany’s BDZV news publishers’ association, Dietmar Wolff, said: “It is high time that governments all over the world limit the market power of the gatekeeper platforms.”

Facebook shares traded down 2% on Thursday.

DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

Publishers say platforms such as Google and Facebook hoard the bulk of revenue as media shifts online as print and broadcast advertising shrivels, forcing newspapers and TV and radio stations to scale down newsrooms or shut.

Google has complained that Australia’s rules go further than new revenue-sharing laws in parts of Europe, because they would apply even to links and snippets of articles, which it says limits internet users’ free speech.

Still, Facebook’s action in Australia represented a tactical split with Google. They had campaigned together against such laws and both threatened to cancel services in Australia, but Google sealed pre-emptive deals with several media outlets in recent days.

Google declined comment on Facebook’s action.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was the latest to announce a deal in which it will receive “significant payments” from Google to provide content for the search engine’s News Showcase account.

Facebook drew particular condemnation for including in its blackout charity accounts and major state governments, including those providing advice on the COVID-19 pandemic and bushfire threats. Some were later restored.

Facebook said the planned Australian law, expected to be passed by parliament within days, “fundamentally misunderstands” the relationship between itself and publishers and it faced a stark choice of complying or banning news.

The tech giant has said news makes up just 4% of what people view on its website. But for Australians, Facebook’s role in news delivery is growing. A 2020 University of Canberra study found 21% of Australians use social media as their primary news source and 39% of the population uses Facebook to receive news.

With professional journalism blacked out, “Facebook has exponentially increased the opportunity for misinformation, dangerous radicalism and conspiracy theories to abound on its platform,” tweeted Lisa Davies, editor of The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye in Sydney; Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm, Guy Faulconbridge in London, Emma Thomasson, Elizabeth Culliford in New York and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Jane Wardell, Timothy Heritage and Lisa Shumaker)

Dollar slips in risk-off session, cryptocurrencies scale new heights

Posted on Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 3:09pmThu, Feb 18, 2021, 3:22pm by Reuters

By Stephen Culp

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The dollar lost ground on Thursday, ending a two-day winning streak as hopes for a speedy economic recovery from the global heath crisis was dampened by disappointing labor market data, which put market participants in a risk-off mood.

“It’s hard to reconcile what’s pulling the dollar lower today,” said Mazen Issa, senior currency analyst at TD Securities in New York. “But since the start of this year, around the Georgia (senatorial election) runoff, the relative U.S. equity performance has been positively correlated to the dollar.”

Bitcoin backed away from its record high of $52,640 reached overnight. The cryptocurrency has surged roughly 79% so far this year as institutional interest gains momentum, prompting some analysts to warn that the rally could be unsustainable.

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of volume and market capitalization, hit a record high of $1,939, having soared by nearly 1,400% so far this year.

Last week the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched futures on ether, the digital currency or token that facilitates transactions on the ethereum blockchain. It was last up 4.00% at $1,925.30.

“For now it’s a speculative trade, but there’s certainly a place for it in tomorrow’s economy,” Issa added. “It’s not going to go away but there’s a great deal of speculation taking place, and the FOMO aspect is a major component.”

An unexpected increase in weekly jobless claims dampened enthusiasm over otherwise upbeat data this week, the day after minutes from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s most recent monetary policy meeting showed the central bank was determined to continue supporting the economic recovery.

The dollar index was off 0.33% at 90.601 following two straight days of gains.

The euro gained 0.38% to $1.2086 after sliding 0.5% overnight, the most in two weeks.

The yen gained some ground against the greenback and was last almost flat at 105.685, but still below its 200-day moving average.

Sterling advanced 0.77% against the dollar and was last at 1.397, and hit a high against the euro of 86.525 pence. The pound is the best-performing G10 currency against the dollar this year.[GBP/]

(Reporting by Stephen Culp; additional reporting by Ritvik Carvalho; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Facebook shares dip as Wall Street ponders Australia news fallout

Posted on Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:43amThu, Feb 18, 2021, 11:56am by Reuters

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc shares fell 2% on Thursday as Wall Street assessed the wider ramifications of its move to block all news content in Australia.

The surprise escalation of the battle over a law which would require Facebook and Google to reach deals to pay news outlets was denounced by media, politicians and human rights groups as it became clear that official health pages and emergency warnings had been scrubbed along with news sites.

Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik, however, said investors were likely to judge Facebook’s stand against the legislation as “prudent”, given the potentially wider implications of similar moves following in other big global markets.

“While I believe Facebook said that news links only account for 4% or so of content, the danger here is contagion if other countries pursue similar legislation with broader definitions of who is a publisher – could this spiral into Facebook paying influencers for their posts?”, Shmulik said.

Facebook has flagged commercial risks around copyright and content moderation consistently to investors in recent years, while successfully riding out the public relations fallout as its advertising revenue surged.

Along with Google owner Alphabet Inc, it now controls more than half of the digital advertising markets globally. Last year alone, Facebook raked in more than $84 billion in ad sales.

Graphic: Facebook’s advertising revenue jumped over 30% y/y in Q4 2020 – https://graphics.reuters.com/FACEBOOK-STOCKS/rlgpdejorvo/chart.png

Summit Insights Group analyst Jonathan Kees said Facebook does not rely on news unlike Google and so its advertisers would stick as long as its community of users stay engaged with the platform by posting and sharing content.

The company’s shares, up 33% last year even as the platform was widely criticized for its handling of hate speech and misinformation related to COVID-19, dipped 2.2% in early trade in New York.

Graphic: Social media companies outperformed S&P 500 since the start of 2020 – https://graphics.reuters.com/FACEBOOK-STOCKS/gjnvwzjxzpw/chart.png

Among other big technology firm, Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, and Alphabet Inc were all down between 0.6% and 1.3%.

Like others of the “stay-at-home” stock market winners from the past year’s COVID-19 lockdowns, Facebook has soared in value and is now worth almost $800 billion. Filings show that in the past three months, company insiders have sold $788 million of shares.

Another analyst, Mirabaud Securities’ Neil Campling, contrasted Facebook’s “PR disaster” with Google’s unveiling this week of a multi-year deal for news content with Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

(Reporting by Ayanti Bera and Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru, Thyagaraju Adinarayan in London; Editing Patrick Graham, Bernard Orr and Anil D’Silva)

Australian regulator raises antitrust doubts over Aon’s $30-billion Willis Towers bid

Posted on Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:41pmWed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:53pm by Reuters

(Reuters) – Australia’s competition regulator on Thursday raised initial concerns over Aon’s $30 billion bid for Willis Towers Watson to create the world’s largest insurance broker, close on the heels of a similar move by EU antitrust regulators.

The merger could significantly hurt competition in commercial risk, reinsurance and employee benefits broking and advisory services in Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said.

The pandemic has triggered a sharp rise in claims for insurers and hit their investment portfolios, which along with falling valuations have sparked several deals in the insurance industry.

Aon bid for Willis in March last year in an all-stock deal, which was the insurance sector’s largest ever.

Representatives of Aon and Willis declined to comment on the matter.

The regulator said the deal may lead to price increases or reduced service levels for large or high-value commercial insurance customers and may also limit the insurance coverage and pricing smaller brokers could get for their customers.

It was particularly concerned about the effects of the merger on reinsurance broking services, which it deemed vital for the Australian economy.

Australian insurers have been hit by claims from natural disasters such as wildfires and hailstorms and have bumped up their reinsurance covers in recent times to help shield the impact of these unforeseen large-scale payouts.

The European Commission had raised similar concerns about the deal in December, but suspended its investigation in February as it waited for the U.S. insurance broker to provide data required for the case.

The ACCC said feedback on the issues it had raised was due by March 12.

(Reporting by Rashmi Ashok in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Arundhati Dutta and Arpit Nayak; Editing by Maju Samuel and Arun Koyyur)

Facebook blocks news content in Australia as it blasts proposed law

Posted on Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:00pmWed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:11pm by Reuters

By Sheila Dang

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc will block news content from being read and shared in its news feed in Australia, drawing a line in the sand against a proposed Australian law that would require it and Alphabet Inc’s Google to pay the country’s news publishers for content.

The move, announced in a blog post on Wednesday, represents a divergence in responses among the big tech giants to demands by news publishers, which have blamed the companies for destroying their advertising business. (Blog: https://bit.ly/3u7EInp)

Australia Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he had a “constructive discussion” with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, adding the talks with the company on the proposed media payment law would continue.

“(Zuckerberg) raised a few remaining issues with the government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our conversation to try to find a pathway forward,” Frydenberg said in a tweet.

The Australian federal government has said it plans to put the legislation, which effectively force Google and Facebook to strike deals with media companies or have fees set for them, to a vote in the coming weeks.

Google has also threatened to shut down its search engine in the country to avoid “unworkable” content laws even as it has secured deals with publishers in the United Kindgom, Germany, France, Brazil and Argentina for its Google News Showcase product.

On Wednesday, Google reached a landmark global deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal and two-thirds of Australia’s major city newspapers, to develop a subscription platform and share advertising revenue.

Facebook said the proposed legislation “fundamentally misunderstands” the relationship between itself and publishers, arguing that news outlets voluntarily post their article links on Facebook, which helped Australian publishers earn about AU$407 million in 2020 through referrals.

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, tweeted on Wednesday that the relationship was not as voluntary as it seems, and most publishers feel obligated to be on Facebook due to its dominance.

Facebook, which has long been criticized for allowing misinformation to flourish on its platforms, now finds itself in a peculiar position of also blocking the news media that has provided a fact check on false content.

“Nobody benefits from this decision as Facebook will now be a platform for misinformation to rapidly spread without balance,” said a spokesman for Nine, an Australian television network. “This action proves again their monopoly position and unreasonable behaviour.”

Starting on Wednesday, Australian users will not be able read or share news content on Facebook news feeds, and Australian news publishers will be restricted from posting or sharing content on Facebook pages.

(Reporting by Akanksha Rana in Bengaluru and Sheila Dang in Dallas; additional reporting by Elizabeth Culliford, Paresh Dave and Renju Jose; Editing by Kenneth Li, Jonathan Oatis and Lisa Shumaker)

US judge dismisses aluminum antitrust claims

Posted on Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 4:04pmWed, Feb 17, 2021, 4:09pm by Reuters

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Wednesday narrowed a long-running antitrust case where aluminum purchasers accused Goldman Sachs , JPMorgan Chase and the mining company Glencore of conspiring to drive up the metal’s price by reducing supply.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer said many purchasers lacked standing to sue because they had bought aluminum primarily from smelters such as Alcoa and Rio Tinto Alcan rather than directly from the defendants, and thus did not qualify as “efficient enforcers” of antitrust laws.

In a 66-page decision, the Manhattan judge also said pricing decisions by the smelters appeared to be a big factor in the prices ultimately charged, and that those prices were “not the inevitable result of defendants’ alleged conspiracy.”

The purchasers had accused banks and commodity trading, mining and metals warehousing companies of conspiring to hoard aluminum when prices were low roughly a decade ago.

They said this resulted in delays in processing orders and higher storage costs, raising the cost of making cabinets, flashlights, soda cans and other goods containing aluminum.

Engelmayer dismissed all claims by several individual purchasers including Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm, as well as claims by some “first level” purchasers whose motion for class certification he had denied last July.

The judge said Reynolds Consumer Products and two other plaintiffs that transacted directly with the defendants could still pursue their cases.

Lawyers for the various plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Goldman spokeswoman Maeve DuVally, JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony and Glencore spokesman Charles Watenphul declined to comment.

The litigation began in 2013. Another judge had dismissed various antitrust claims in 2016, but was overturned by the federal appeals court in Manhattan in 2019.

The main case is In re Aluminum Warehousing Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-md-02481.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)

Australian media firms squeeze more from Google as new law looms

Posted on Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:41amWed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:56am by Reuters

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia claimed an early win in a protracted licencing battle with Google on Wednesday as media companies lined up to announce content deals with the internet giant that were reportedly far more lucrative than their global rivals.

A month after the Alphabet Inc-owned company threatened to shut down its search engine in Australia to avoid what it called “unworkable” content laws, the country’s two largest free-to-air television broadcasters have struck deals collectively worth A$60 million ($47 million) a year, according to media reports.

That dwarfs the $76 million Google will split between 121 publishers in France over three years, which averages $209,000 a year per publisher, as reported by Reuters.

The Australian deals come days before the government plans to pass laws that would allow it to appoint an arbitrator to set Google’s content fees if it can’t strike a deal privately, a factor that government and media figures held up as a turning point for negotiations which stalled a year earlier.

“I don’t think that they would have been able to get that sort of money if they had to follow the normal sort of negotiations with a company that’s so powerful,” said Paul Budde, an independent internet analyst, referring to the Australian media companies.

Google and Nine declined to comment on unsourced reports in Nine’s newspapers on Wednesday that said the companies had reached an agreement. Seven and Google said two days earlier they had struck a deal, without giving financials.

Though the individual deals mean Google avoids a government-appointed arbitrator with those companies, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he would still press ahead with the law.

The local arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which has led a years-long campaign to make internet giants pay for content that drives traffic to their platforms, is yet to sign a Google deal. News Corp, owner of two-thirds of Australia’s major city newspapers, did not respond to requests for comment.

“None of these deals would be happening if we didn’t have the legislation before the Parliament,” Frydenberg told reporters.

Australian antitrust commissioner Rod Sims, who drafted the media laws, declined to comment but a spokesman directed Reuters to an earlier statement in which Sims called the law a “back-up” that prevented internet platforms forcing “terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis”.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Though specifics of the Australian deals have not been disclosed, smaller outlets that inked Google deals last year ahead of their larger rivals said they were approached individually by the U.S. company and asked to present their own valuation methods for content that would appear on Google’s “Showcase” news platform.

That contrasts with the French negotiations, which were conducted on behalf of publishers by the Alliance de la presse d’information generale (APIG), a lobby group representing most major French publishers.

Unlike the Australian law, through which the government could intervene if the parties cannot reach a deal, the French rules, enacted under a recent European Union law, require only that Big Tech platforms open talks with publishers seeking payment.

“The context of the (Australian) bargaining was very much one in which the government legislation was putting pressure on the digital platforms to come to the table, and that has strengthened the hand of publishers and contributed to these outcomes,” said Misha Ketchell, editor of The Conversation, an academic-focused website that signed a Google deal last year.

Separately, the Reuters news agency, a division of Thomson Reuters Corp, struck a deal with Google in January, becoming the first global news provider to Google News Showcase.

($1 = 1.2903 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Sam Holmes)