Australia’s parliament has enacted a contentious law aimed at forcing Big Tech to pay for news content, in a move that could encourage other countries to pass similar legislation.
The “world-first” regulation, which was drafted to tackle the dominance of Facebook and Google in the country, has forced both companies to strike licensing deals with news publishers. However, the two groups retained serious reservations about the code, which prompted Facebook to temporarily block all news sharing on its platform in Australia last week.
Facebook said on Tuesday it would lift its ban on news sharing following eleventh-hour negotiations with Canberra that resulted in a number of amendments to the law. Those changes could provide the Silicon Valley groups with greater flexibility to avoid the most stringent elements of the code.