On June 16, 2026, ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb told MLex that her agency would "continue to rely on its existing enforcement toolkit to address competition and other similar concerns in digital-platform markets until a dedicated ex ante regime is introduced." Those tools, she specified, are competition litigation, enforceable undertakings, market monitoring and consumer protection cases. It was a candid line, and it deserves to be read as more than a procedural update: it is an admission that the regulatory architecture Australia has been promising since 2022 still does not exist, and that the country's flagship platform intervention — the News Media Bargaining Code — has not closed the gap it was built to close.
What the code was supposed to do
The strongest case for the bargaining code is real and should be stated plainly. The ACCC argues there is a genuine "significant bargaining power imbalance" between individual news publishers and platforms that aggregate their content, and that public-interest journalism is a service with positive externalities a pure market may under-fund. When the code passed in March 2021, that diagnosis produced results: the ACCC records more than 30 commercial agreements between platforms and news businesses, worth a reported ~A$200 million in the first year, without the Treasurer ever having to formally "designate" a single platform. The mere threat of designation did the work. For a light-touch instrument, that is a defensible outcome, and proponents are right to point to it.
Why the model is now visibly straining
The problem is that the code's central mechanism depends on a threat that platforms have learned to call. In March 2024, Meta announced it would not renew its Facebook news deals when they expired — and because designation is discretionary and litigation-heavy, the government has still not designated it. The code's elegant deterrent turns out to work only against firms that value carrying news more than they value avoiding the levy. Once a platform decides news traffic is dispensable, the "threat of designation" the ACCC describes as having "the appropriate and intended impact" loses its bite.
Canberra's response was not to fix the code but to bolt a new structure onto it. The News Bargaining Incentive, announced in December 2024, would charge digital platforms with Australian revenue above A$270 million a fixed levy, offset if they strike direct deals with publishers — and, critically, it would apply whether or not the platform carries any news at all. Treasury opened consultation on the draft legislation on April 28, 2026, closing May 18. As of Cass-Gottlieb's June remarks, it remains unlegislated.
The deeper problem: a charge untethered from harm
Here is where proportionality matters. A levy that attaches to a revenue threshold rather than to any specific conduct — and that bites even on platforms that have removed news entirely — is no longer a bargaining mechanism. It is a sector transfer dressed as competition policy. The original code at least tied obligations to a finding about a particular platform's contribution to the news ecosystem. The Incentive abandons that link. It risks penalising firms for declining to carry a product, which is closer to a compelled-dealing rule than a remedy for market power, and it invites the predictable response: platforms further deprioritise Australian news to shrink their exposure and their legal risk. That is the opposite of what the policy claims to want.
A charge that applies regardless of whether a platform carries news converts a bargaining code into a standing tax on scale — and taxes on scale are a blunt instrument for a problem that was always about specific conduct.
The case for the regime the ACCC actually wants
This is why Cass-Gottlieb's framing is telling. The tools she listed — litigation, undertakings, monitoring — are conduct-based. They require the regulator to identify a specific harm and prove it. That is slower and harder than levying a charge, but it is also more legitimate, because it ties intervention to demonstrated abuse rather than to size alone. The ACCC's own 2026–27 enforcement priorities, published February 19, 2026, lean in exactly this direction, targeting subscription traps and dark patterns — concrete consumer harms — while the agency "continue[s] to work closely with Treasury to progress consideration of digital competition reforms."
A well-designed ex ante regime, of the kind the ACCC has advocated since its Digital Platform Services Inquiry, would impose targeted, service-specific codes on platforms with genuine gatekeeper power in defined markets such as app stores and ad tech. That is a proportionate model: obligations scoped to where market power is shown, with due-process protections, rather than a flat charge keyed to a revenue line. The frustration in Cass-Gottlieb's comment is that this is the regime Australia keeps promising and keeps not passing — leaving the country to improvise with a bargaining code that one major platform has already walked away from, and a successor levy that may make the underlying problem worse.
What to watch
The honest reading of June 16 is that Australia's platform-competition policy is in an interregnum. The code's deterrent has been tested and partly broken; the Incentive is unlegislated and conceptually fraught; and the dedicated regime that would replace ad hoc levies with conduct-based rules remains a Treasury work-in-progress. For a publication that favours proportionate, evidence-based regulation, the right outcome is clear: legislate the targeted ex ante regime, scope it to demonstrated gatekeeper power, and retire the idea that a revenue-threshold charge — owed even by platforms that carry no news — is a serious answer to a competition question.