SYDNEY: Australia unveiled draft laws on Tuesday that would tax tech giants Meta, Google and TikTok unless they voluntarily strike deals to pay local outlets for news.

Traditional media companies around the world are in a battle for survival as readers increasingly consume their news on social media.

Australia wants big tech companies to compensate local publishers for sharing articles that drive traffic on their platforms. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said tech giants Meta, Google and TikTok would be given a chance to strike content deals with local news publishers.

If they refused, they faced a compulsory levy that amounted to 2.25 percent of their Australian revenue, he said. “Large digital platforms cannot avoid their obligations under the news media bargaining code,” Albanese told reporters.

“At this point the three organisations are Meta, Google and TikTok.” The changes aim to close a loophole under a previous media law which allowed organisations to avoid a levy if they removed news from their platforms. The three firms were singled out based on a combination of their Australian revenues and large numbers of domestic users.

“What we are encouraging is for them to sit down with news organisations and get these deals done,” Albanese said. Journalism needed to have a “monetary value attached to it”, Albanese said.

“It shouldn’t be able to be taken by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits with no compensation.” The draft laws have been designed to stop the tech giants from simply stripping news from their platforms. When Canberra mooted similar laws in 2024, Facebook parent Meta announced that Australian users would no longer be able to access the “news” tab.

Meta had previously announced it would not renew content deals with news publishers in the United States, Britain, France and Germany.

‘Only fair’

Meta said the proposed laws were “nothing more than a digital services tax”. “News organisations voluntarily post content on our platforms because they receive value from doing so,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

“The idea that we take their news content is simply wrong.” Google said it already had commercial arrangements in place with more than 90 local news businesses, and was the only technology company in Australia to do so.

“While we are currently reviewing the draft legislation, we have been clear: we reject the need for this tax,” a Google spokesman said. The firm said other major platforms such as Microsoft, Snapchat and OpenAI had been arbitrarily excluded.

Supporters of such laws argue that social media companies attract users with news stories and hoover up online advertising revenue that would otherwise go to struggling newsrooms.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2026