ROME – A shift in Australia: Stop by for free news on search engines and social networks. The law that has just been approved by the House of Representatives and which is also expected to be approved by the Senate very soon, and will go into effect early next week, states that internet giants will have to pay publishers to use published news from newspapers. And so Facebook and Google organized the opposite way: The Mark Zuckerberg Social Network decided to ban viewing and sharing of Australian and international news, so that international publishers could continue to post content on Facebook, but the links and posts could not be viewed or shared by the Australian public. While Google has reached an agreement with several publishers to pay for the articles and news to be published on its platform.
Under the agreement reached with News Corp, Google will pay for journalistic content not only in Australia, but also in other countries: the agreement actually includes the Wall Street Journal and New York Post in the US and The Times and The Sun in the UK. Google has also signed a letter of intent with Nine Entertainment, another important Australian media group.
An agreement of this kind is not new for Google, which pledged to spend $ 1 billion over three years buying journalistic content last year and signed agreements with several publishers in a dozen countries. In fact, he announced in the middle of last year that he would admit to paying publishers for “high-quality content”: among the first publishers to sign a collaboration with Google German Spiegel Group, Editor: Der Spiegel, Diarios Associados, Australian Solstice Media, Local Newspaper Publisher,
But the Financial times, The numbers under discussion in Australia are several times higher than the agreements signed in other parts of the world. The big difference is the pressure of the law that is about to go into effect, which opens up what could be a new season in relationships between publishers and tech giants.
At the moment, Facebook does not accept this assumption: Facebook Australia and New Zealand CEO William Easton explained, according to Australian newspapers, that the law currently under discussion in the Australian Parliament “misunderstands the relationships between our platform and the publishers who use it to share their content and news”. So the new legislation “leaves us only to make a clear decision: try to comply with a law that ignores the reality of this relationship or to stop allowing news to be shared on our platform in Australia. Unfortunately we choose the last option,” concludes the CEO.
“Publishers in our case voluntarily choose to post news on Facebook in order to increase their audience, subscriptions and ad revenue. – Easton explains – as we explained to the Australian government for several months the exchange of services between Facebook and publishers in favor of the latter.” Last year, Facebook produced about 5.1 billion free shares for Australian publishers, with an estimated value of A $ 407 million, the CEO notes.
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