Facebook threatened to block Australian publishers and individuals from sharing news stories on its platform; if the government passes regulations to alter the financial arrangement between publishers and online platforms.
The social media platform said that the move by the Australian government would require them to arbitrarily pay unlimited sums of money for information that makes up only a small fraction of its service.
The measure would force Facebook to choose between “either removing news entirely or accepting a system that lets publishers charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits,” the company's managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Will Easton, wrote in a blog post.
Campbell Brown, a former NBC and CNN anchor who now serves as Facebook's vice president of global news partnerships, in a blog post titled ‘Our Continued Commitment to Journalism’, cited a variety of individual Facebook programs intended to support news organisations, was titled
Google, in the meantime, wrote an open letter suggesting that the Australian law is a potential threat to individual privacy and a burden that would degrade the quality of its search and YouTube video services but did not threaten a cut-off. “Mark Zuckerberg is happy to let Facebook be a tool to spread misinformation and fake news, but is apparently fine with Facebook dropping real news altogether,” John Stanton, co-founder of the Save Journalism Project, was quoted as saying in an AP report.
“Regulators need to reign in the tech giants’ total domination of the online marketplace before it’s too late,” Stanton added.
The Australian government had announced in July that it would require tech giants Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google to pay for news provided by media companies under a royalty-style system, which is slated to become a law this year. It plans to give the tech giants three months to negotiate with Australian media businesses fair pay for news content.
Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg proposed the laws, hoping it “would create a more sustainable media landscape and see payment for original content.”
