The government has proposed the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) up for consultation, a scheme to charge a 2.25% levy on the revenue generated in Australia by large platforms such as Google, Meta, and TikTok. The mechanism aims to address the weaknesses of the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code, ensure funding for journalism, and prevent companies from evading their obligations by removing news content.
The Australian government has unveiled a new initiative to revive and strengthen the system established in 2021 with the Negotiation Code, which facilitated several payment agreements between platforms and media outlets for the use of their journalistic content. However, the government stated that there had been “breaches” and that the media “deserve fair compensation.”
Faced with this scenario, the government opened a consultation on the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), an initiative first anticipated at the end of 2024, which establishes that platforms must sign agreements with media outlets or pay a charge of 2.25% on their income in Australia if they exceed 250 million Australian dollars annually (about US$ 161 million) for search or social networking services.
According to the government, the 2021 Code led to around 30 agreements with an estimated value of AUD 200–250 million per year (roughly US $129–161 million). But the scheme depended on the willingness of platforms: some agreements expired without renewal, the government never formally “designated” the platforms under the law, and in recent years the parent company Meta decided not to renew its contracts with Australian media.
In that context, the existing system was practically paralyzed, and the media lost an effective mechanism for demanding compensation. According to the government, the NBI will reactivate and strengthen the framework.
Under the NBI, the levy is designed to encourage direct negotiations. For each dollar a platform pays to media under a bilateral agreement, it could deduct A$1.50 from the amount of the mandatory charge. Moreover, those payments would be tax-deductible, while the 2.25 % levy would not — making it fiscally more attractive for platforms to fund journalism directly than to simply pay the levy.
The proposed scheme also sets a cap on the total amount of bilateral deals each platform may use to offset the levy. The aim is to avoid concentration of funds toward a few major conglomerates, and encourage distribution of resources to medium-size, local, or independent media outlets. The charge applies to revenue generated in Australia, regardless of where the company is headquartered, and would apply even to platforms that choose not to publish news–a condition that aims to prevent the strategy of blocking news on platforms, a tactic already employed by several companies in Canada and other countries.
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