Facebook blocked last month the ability of Australian users and media organizations to share news links in the country, and it now appears that the company’s extraordinary move has resulted in a deal for the most interested parties as the media giant News Corp has closed a licensing agreement with the social network.
Financial terms have not been released, but the deal is multi-year and gives the Facebook news platform access to the main properties of News Corp Australia, including news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, and Sky News. Google also struck a deal with News Corp last month, when the threat of a new Australian law regulating technology companies’ payments to news outlets hung over their heads.
The closure of Facebook news in Australia was not specifically designed to increase pressure on News Corp. Instead, Facebook wanted concessions from the Australian government over the media trading law, which stipulated that major technology platforms like Facebook and Google would need to pay news publishers to access their content. Google also threatened to close its search engine in Australia, but ended up closing its own businesses.
In a predictable turn of events, Facebook received the desired concessions, the largest of which involved denying the forced arbitration portion of the bill that Silicon Valley would insult if previous trade deals were closed, and the company restored its ability to share News. Australia then passed the law and everyone left more or less unscathed. However, part of Facebook’s initial opposition to the law was that it gave the most powerful publishers a lot of bargaining power, and News Corp is by far the largest and most widespread media conglomerate in Australia.
“Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misrepresents the relationship between publishers and Facebook – without even a guarantee that it is used to pay for journalism, let’s go alone support smaller publishers, ”argued Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global politics, at the time in a public blog post.
After the confrontation in Australia, Facebook said it would commit $ 1 billion in news industry deals over the next three years to foster partnerships with media organizations, with the tacit stipulation that it would not have to face another media trading law like that of Australia. (Facebook said it reserves the right to end news in Australia again, if it so wishes.)
It looks like Facebook and News Corp have agreed, and this new deal will make News Corp’s owned publishers accessible on the Facebook news platform in Australia. In addition to news.com.au and Sky News, the last of which has a separate agreement as a broadcast organization, News Corp says it is also licensing content from major newspapers like The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun in Victoria, and The Courier-Mail, as well as several regional publishers.
“The Facebook deal is a milestone in transforming journalism’s terms of trade and will have a material and significant impact on our Australian news business,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement. “Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch led a global debate while others in our industry remained silent or indifferent while digital dysfunctionality threatened to turn journalism into a begging order.”
“We are happy to have this agreement in place and we look forward to bringing Facebook News to Australia,” wrote Campbell Brown, Head of Global News Partnerships at Faceboo. Andrew Hunter, head of Facebook news partnerships for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement that “the deals with News Corp Australia and Sky News Australia mean that people on Facebook will have access to premium news articles and videos breaking news from the News Corp network of national, metropolitan, rural and suburban newsrooms. ”