Australia proposes 2.25% levy on Meta, Google, and TikTok unless they pay news publishers

The Australian government released draft legislation on Tuesday for a News Bargaining Incentive that would impose a 2.25% levy on the Australian revenues of Meta, Google, and TikTok unless those platforms strike deals to pay local news publishers for the journalism that appears on their platforms. Communications Minister Anika Wells and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese presented the proposal at a press conference in Canberra. The levy is intended to apply from the 2025. 26 financial year, which starts on 1 July 2026. Meta, Google, and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The mechanism is structured as a market incentive rather than a mandate. Platforms that negotiate and sign deals with Australian news publishers will receive offsets against the levy, with larger offsets available for deals struck with smaller, regional news organisations. If a platform does no deals, the full 2.25% levy on its Australian revenue is payable, with proceeds directed back to news publishers based on their journalist headcounts. Wells framed it explicitly as a carrot-and-stick arrangement. "Platforms should do deals with news organisations. If they decide not to, they will end up paying more," she said. Albanese added: "What we're encouraging is for organisations to sit down with news organisations, get these deals done, and then we can move forward." The levy base is defined as the platform's consolidated revenue "attributable to Australia," calculated from their financial statements from three years earlier, a backward-looking assessment designed to prevent gaming through revenue reallocation. The 2.25% rate applies to revenue across the covered platforms, not specifically to advertising revenue or news-adjacent revenue, which makes it a broader tax instrument than the approaches taken in Europe. The proposal explicitly replaces the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code, the Morrison-era law that required platforms to negotiate in good faith with publishers or face mandatory arbitration. The government's assessment is that those rules are "no longer working effectively." The original code had a complicated history. After it was passed, Meta temporarily blocked Australian users from sharing news articles on Facebook in a high-profile standoff. It subsequently struck deals with several Australian media firms, as did Google. Those deals expired in 2024, and with the platforms having chosen not to renew them, the government concluded the voluntary negotiation framework had run its course. The draft bill explicitly excludes "artificial intelligence services that solely use large language models to provide answers to questions or other information." That carve-out is designed to prevent the levy from applying to AI chatbots like Gemini, Meta AI, or ChatGPT when they are accessed directly as question-answering services. Whether that distinction is legally durable as AI-powered search increasingly replaces traditional link-based results is a question the legislation will face over time.