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- Hacker News
- They could have just bumped up GST for online advertising, but why take the simple approach when you can build Byzantine regulatory frameworks.by mr_toad
- > 2.5% on their advertising revenues
Does anybody know if that is enough for them to care? Surely they should be paying 30% tax on profit (not revenue above) regardless. Of cause I assume they use tax havens to avoid paying Australia tax.
by Humphrey - It would be very difficult to enforce, but a mechanism to force scrapers to pay would probably be more effective than this. The social media sites can live without local news. Web search and LLM providers cannot live without new data and up-to-date information about the world.by arctic-true
- The theory that these online platforms are stealing value from the news companies is thoroughly disproven by the fact that they would rather ban news from their platform than make the payments. This is a government shakedown and nothing more. If local news is worth funding publicly then it should be done properly out of a general tax on the public like other public programs.by consensus1
- Governments tax entities to pay for stuff all the time. Why is this agreement requirement in there? Just tax Meta and pay the local news stations.by juiceland
- > Proceeds from the scheme would be directed to local Australian news outlets
If this is anything like the last similar law Australia passed, this is SEVERELY glossing over the details.
Because of size and criteria, only one “local Australian” news outlet got the money the Australian government collected.
They were all owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Oh yes, Australia has a current law whereby Facebook pay the government, and they give 100% of it directly to Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world.
Utterly disgusting.
by testing22321 - Unfortunately for them, not publishing news will likely cost the giants less than the payments they'd have to make to keep the news.
News writers are in a supplicant position. They need the tech giants to disseminate their news way more than the tech giants need them.
By nature, it's a very asymmetrical relationship.
by mc32 - Didn't Canada try this in 2023?
> Online News Act (Bill C-18) in June 2023. The law was designed to make large digital platforms compensate Canadian news organizations when news content was made available through their services. It created a bargaining/arbitration framework rather than literally setting a per-link tax.
> So beginning in August 2023, Meta blocked news on both Facebook and Instagram in Canada. Canadians could no longer view or share links/content from Canadian or foreign news organizations on those platforms... As of 2026, the Canadian government still describes Meta as blocking news sharing on Facebook and Instagram
Pretty much the worst result for everyone. Newspapers get less traffic, can't use social media even if they wanted to. Inconvenience to users. Meta mostly unaffected, maybe some marginal loss in time spent on the platform.
These kinds of things eventually just face reality. Meta and Google know very well how much these things are worth to them in terms of marginal revenue or network value. And the answer is not what publishers want to hear.
by bko