Australia passes law to force Facebook and Google to pay for news

Enlarge / Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. (credit: Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

The Parliament of Australia has passed a final version of legislation designed to force Google and Facebook to pay to link to news articles. The passage of the News Media Bargaining Code marks the end of a contentious months-long negotiation between the Australian government and the two technology giants-which are singled out in the code.

Google and Facebook have long argued that they shouldn't have to pay a dime to link to news articles, since the links send valuable traffic to news sites. Over the last decade, Google has successfully beaten back efforts to undermine the principle of free linking.

But over the last couple of years, governments in Australia and Europe have become more determined to force American technology giants to financially support their domestic news industries. In 2019, the European Parliament created a new "neighboring right" giving news sites the right to control the use of "snippets" in search results, and French regulators made it clear that Google wasn't allowed to simply stop showing snippets-Google needed to cough up some cash.

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