ABSTRACT
At a time when many news media businesses are collapsing or faltering, regulators globally are wrestling with how to support news and journalism. Australia’s competition (anti-trust) regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, has developed a legislative scheme known as the ‘News Media Bargaining Code’, which seeks to enforce a compulsory arbitration process to determine how much Google and Facebook must pay for the use of news content. Highly controversial and subject to extensive redrafting, this regulatory intervention was seen as necessary because of the ‘bargaining power imbalance’ between these digital platforms and local news publishers. However, in the legislation that creates the Code, the word ‘quality’ appears only once. This seems particularly problematic given that the aim of the regulatory intervention was not simply to address unequal commercial positions, but to shore up the public benefit provided by journalism. In this chapter, we explain how key concerns around digital platforms’ effect on the capacity of Australian news providers to pursue public interest journalism have been translated into policy. We argue that by deploying the tools of competition law instead of media regulation, the Australian Government is overlooking the social utility of news and is building a scheme that could incentivize the creation of poor-quality content.
