A levy you can erase by signing cheques
On 28 April 2026, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese opened consultation on draft legislation for a News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) — a mechanism designed to make large digital platforms pay for Australian journalism whether or not they carry it. The consultation closed on 18 May. The design is deliberate: platforms earning more than A$250 million in Australian-attributable revenue, with at least 5 million monthly social-media users or 10 million search users, face a 2.25% charge on that local revenue — but the charge can be offset, potentially down to nothing, by striking commercial deals with registered news publishers. Google, Meta and, for the first time, TikTok are the platforms in scope.
The government's own framing is candid about the target. The PM's release says the measure "addresses a limitation in the long-standing News Media Bargaining Code which allows digital platforms to avoid their obligations by removing news from their service." In plain terms: this is built to stop another company doing what Meta did.
The problem the government is trying to fix
The case for intervention is real and worth stating fairly. Australia's 2021 News Media Bargaining Code — enacted via the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Act 2021, assented on 2 March 2021 — was a genuine policy success on its own terms. It triggered over 30 commercial agreements between Google, Meta and a cross-section of metropolitan and regional newsrooms. Former ACCC chair Rod Sims estimated those deals were worth over A$200 million a year, roughly a quarter of the cost of journalism in Australia, money that demonstrably funded reporting jobs. Local news is a public good that markets under-supply, and a serious bargaining-power imbalance between a handful of platforms and a fragmented press is a legitimate thing for a regulator to address.
But the Code's enforcement lever was never actually pulled. Its obligations only bite once the Treasurer formally designates a platform, and to date no platform has ever been designated. Worse, designation only forces bargaining if the platform carries news. So when Meta announced on 29 February 2024 that it would shut Facebook News and not renew its agreements, it could exit news entirely and owe nothing. The threat that gave the Code its power — designate-and-bargain — turned out to be a threat a platform could simply walk away from. The NBI's answer is to detach the obligation from news carriage altogether and attach it to revenue and reach.
A charge by any other name
That is also the NBI's central flaw. A payment obligation that applies regardless of whether a platform shows, links to, or benefits from news is no longer a bargaining code — it is a sector-specific tax on three named foreign firms, administered through the tax system with returns filed after each financial year. The "incentive" label rests on a choice that is not really a choice: pay the publishers, or pay the Treasury. Meta's response — that this is "nothing more than a digital service tax" on a company that does not take news content — is self-interested, but on the structure it is hard to refute.
The offset machinery confirms the point. Liability can be reduced through deals carrying an uplift of 150% for large publishers and 170% for smaller ones, but no single publisher group can offset more than 25% of a platform's bill — which forces each platform to spread money across at least four separate news businesses to zero out the charge. This is the state not merely requiring payment but engineering its distribution, picking how many counterparties a private firm must transact with and on what terms. The original Code already drew criticism because its deals sat behind non-disclosure agreements, leaving smaller publishers unable to see what a fair price even looked like. The NBI scales that opacity up and hard-codes the bargaining outcome into statute.
The geopolitics compound the problem. A Trump administration spokesperson has already branded the measure "foreign extortion," and the Computer & Communications Industry Association has urged Washington to pursue "targeted trade remedies." A levy explicitly scoped to capture three American and Chinese platforms — and almost no one else — is precisely the kind of discriminatory digital tax that invites tariff retaliation, putting the broader Australian economy in the firing line to subsidise one sector.
Fund journalism without the coercion
None of this means Australian journalism should be left to wither. It means the tool is disproportionate to the goal. If the public interest is a well-funded press, the honest instruments are transparent and contestable ones: direct grants administered at arm's length, refundable tax credits tied to verifiable newsroom employment, or competition enforcement against genuine anticompetitive conduct on its merits. Each of those funds journalism without conscripting specific firms, dictating their commercial counterparties, or dressing a tax as a negotiation.
The NBI's drafters are right that the 2021 Code had a loophole. But the lesson of Meta's exit is that coercive bargaining mandates are brittle — platforms will reorganise around them, and the cost lands on users and trade relationships rather than on the abstraction of "Big Tech." Closing one loophole by building a broader, blunter levy trades a flawed mechanism for a heavier one. Proportion, not reach, should set the price.