Australia’s Treasury Secretary Josh Friedenberg told public channel ABC that there was “great progress” in discussions with Facebook manager Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the weekend.
“I think we are close to very important trade agreements,” the minister said, adding that it “will change the Australian media landscape”.
The Australian government is working on a “binding code of conduct” project to regulate the relationship between traditional ‘media’, which begins with major financial difficulties and internet giants, starting with Google and Facebook, which Most advertisements capture revenue.
Both Google and Facebook have threatened to suspend their services if Canberra did not change its plan to force internet giants to pay for its content.
The absence of a code of conduct obliges Google and Facebook to negotiate remuneration with each media outlet to disseminate its content, with the possibility of arbitration intervention.
News Corp and Nine Entertainment’s largest Australian information groups estimate that it costs millions of dollars a year to compensate.
Both the United States government-backed Google and Facebook argued that the project underpins their business model and the functioning of the Internet.
The Australian initiative is closely monitored around the world, at a time when the media is suffering huge losses, in a digital economy where ad revenue is increasingly being captured by Facebook, Google and other large tech companies.
The media crisis was exacerbated by the economic collapse caused by the Kovid-19 epidemic. In Australia, dozens of newspapers were closed and hundreds of journalists were fired.
