American online social media networking company Facebook refused a call from the Australian government to pay media companies for using their content. They argue that there is no important commercial benefit from having news on Facebook. In addition to that Facebook would rather cut the news content from its Facebook platform. A mandatory Code of conduct was developed by the Australian Competition and Commission (ACCC) as per the order of the government for Facebook and Google that will force the tech giants to pay media companies for using their content. In its submission to the Australian Competition watchdog, Facebook said that they had rejected many possible ideas and there was a healthy competition between themselves and news publishers.
The tech giant Facebook said that they had supported the idea of a code of conduct between the digital platform and the news publishers, but unfortunately Google was selected inequitably. In Australia News publishers nine and other media have decided to cut the editorial staff and more than 170 newsrooms and newspapers shuttered in recent years. ACCC said that Google and Facebook earned somewhat an estimation of around Aus$6 billion in a year from the advertisement. Last month Google rejected the demand from the leading news publishers to pay at least 10 percent of the money they earned to the local organizations.
Both the tech giants argued that they provide millions of dollars to the Australian companies by managing traffic to the website, they can convert it into money through advertisement. They also say that both of them provide dollars to media companies through grant programs and limited purchases of news content. In addition to that, they are also showing interest in participating in the Joint Code of conduct in Australia to settle the complaint and ensure greater transparency regarding how they rank and distribute news on the platform and share data on user interactions with their content.
The Australian watchdog had drawn up the final code, which the government obliged to implement the code of conduct quickly and the code of conduct governs issues such as revenue sharing, curbing disinformation, data sharing, and protecting user privacy.
