India's competition regulator is once again at the centre of a global debate about who pays for news. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is investigating Google over a complaint by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) — whose members include the Times Group, HT Media, and the Indian Express — alleging that the platform's dominance lets it dictate terms and underpay for journalism. The Indian Newspaper Society has joined the chorus, and a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology has recommended a mandatory revenue-sharing framework modelled on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code. The Draft Digital Competition Bill, which borrows from the EU's Digital Markets Act but threads in Australian-style bargaining obligations, remains under active consideration in New Delhi.
The grievance is real. Indian publishers, like their counterparts everywhere, have watched advertising migrate to a handful of platforms while their own newsroom economics deteriorated. But the remedy on offer — compelling private commercial negotiations between platforms and publishers, backed by arbitration — is one of the most contested experiments in global tech policy. Before India enshrines it in statute, it is worth asking whether the Australian model has actually worked, and whether it fits an Indian media landscape that looks nothing like Sydney's.
What Australia's Code Actually Did
The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, passed by Australia in 2021, was the first law of its kind. It empowered the Treasurer to 'designate' digital platforms, after which they would be required to negotiate payments with eligible news businesses or face binding final-offer arbitration. In practice, no platform was ever formally designated. The threat of designation — combined with intense public pressure during the Facebook news blackout of February 2021 — produced a wave of commercial deals between Google, Meta, and major Australian publishers, reportedly worth around AUD 200 million per year in aggregate.
That looked, briefly, like a policy success. By 2024, the picture had changed sharply. Meta announced it would not renew its Australian news deals when they expired, and the Australian government responded in late 2024 by proposing a 'News Bargaining Incentive' — effectively a tax on large platforms that refuse to strike commercial deals. In other words, the original code's central mechanism failed the moment a platform decided it would rather walk away from news than pay for it. The lesson is not that platforms hold all the cards, but that a regime built on the implicit threat of a service the platform doesn't need to offer is structurally fragile.
Why The Indian Context Is Different — And Harder
India is not Australia. The Indian news market is vastly larger, more linguistically fragmented, and dominated by a handful of legacy conglomerates whose interests do not map cleanly onto those of small or independent publishers. The DNPA represents some of India's biggest media houses; a bargaining code negotiated on their terms risks entrenching incumbents at the expense of the digital-native and regional outlets that have done the most to expand Indian-language journalism online.
There are three further problems with importing the Australian template:
- It conflates antitrust with industrial policy. A competition regulator's job is to police abuse of dominance, not to set transfer prices between two private industries. The CCI's existing investigation, under Section 4 of the Competition Act, is the appropriate forum if abuse can be proven. A blanket bargaining mandate sidesteps that evidentiary burden.
- It can deter linking and indexing. Google News was withdrawn from Spain for years after a 2014 law required payment for snippets, and Meta has repeatedly indicated it would remove news entirely rather than accept open-ended payment obligations. India should not legislate its way into a less informative search experience.
- It risks regulatory capture. Defining who counts as an 'eligible news business' is inherently political, and in India's polarised media environment, that definition is a power worth fighting over. A code that hands the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting effective veto over which outlets get paid is not a neutral competition tool.
A More Proportionate Path
None of this means New Delhi should do nothing. Three lighter-touch approaches would address the underlying concerns without the collateral damage:
First, let the CCI complete its investigation under existing competition law. If Google is found to abuse dominance in ad-tech or news distribution, structural or behavioural remedies under the Competition Act are available — and more defensible internationally than a sector-specific transfer scheme. The CCI's 2022 Android and Play Store orders show the regulator already has the tools.
Second, the Draft Digital Competition Bill should focus on genuine ex-ante competition harms — self-preferencing, anti-steering, tying — rather than mandating commercial negotiations. The EU's Digital Markets Act, on which the bill is partly modelled, deliberately excluded a bargaining code precisely because European policymakers were unconvinced it works.
Third, if the government wishes to support public-interest journalism, the honest instrument is a public-interest journalism fund — transparent, contestable, and open to small and regional publishers — funded through general taxation or a narrowly tailored digital services levy, not through opaque private deals between two industries.
India has a genuine opportunity to design competition policy that protects pluralism without picking winners. Copying a code that is already being patched up in its country of origin is not that opportunity.