SYDNEY (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp struck a content supply deal with Facebook Inc in Australia, the companies said on Tuesday, a step towards resolving a dispute that saw the social media giant briefly close thousands pages in the country.
The deal, the terms of which have not been released, makes News Corp. the first major media outlet to strike a deal with Facebook under controversial new laws that allow an Australian-appointed arbitrator to set fees if companies fail to do so.
Facebook’s blocking of all media content in the country for a week last month angered world leaders as the blackout included emergency services and government health pages. The strike was ended when Australia agreed to smooth some parts of the new regulations.
News Corp, which owns about two-thirds of Australian metropolitan newspapers, was among the media companies that asked the government to make Alphabet Inc’s Facebook and Google pay for media links that direct viewers and viewers’ dollars. advertising for their platforms.
Google also opposed it for months and threatened, like Facebook, to withdraw the country’s main services, before signing deals with most media outlets – including News Corp. – in the days before the rules became law.
“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,” said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson in a statement thanking Prime Minister Australian minister, treasurer and principal antitrust regulator by name.
Facebook’s head of news partnerships in Australia, Andrew Hunter, said the deal means that the country’s 17 million Facebook users “will have access to premium news articles and breaking news videos from the News Corp network. national, metropolitan, rural and suburban newsrooms ”.
In addition to the country’s best-selling tabloids, The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and The Herald-Sun in Melbourne, News maintains a cable pay-TV network called Sky News, which struck a separate deal with Facebook, the terms of which have not been released. , according to News Corp.
News Corp was the first to say it struck a deal with Facebook, but open TV station and newspaper editor Seven West Media Ltd had previously said it had signed a letter of intent to do so.
On Tuesday, Seven’s rival Nine Entertainment Co Holdings Ltd reported in the Australian Financial Review that it had also signed a letter of intent for a deal with Facebook.
“I’ve always had the vision that we need to see this happen,” said Rod Sims, chairman of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, the architect of the new laws, in a telephone interview.
“If they made a deal with News Corp, they are obviously on track to make deals with other people.
A spokesman for Nine said the company, which also publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, “continues to have constructive and fruitful discussions with Facebook (and) when we have something to announce, we will do it.”
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Nine’s negotiations.
Reporting by Byron Kaye in Sydney and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Gerry Doyle