Australia Pushes for Existence Tax to Cover Up Failed Link Tax

Australia was completely humiliated when their link tax law went down in flames. Now, they are taxing Meta as compensation.

If there was ever a tech law that completely and utterly failed in recent years that wasn’t age verification, it would be the link tax. This is something Canada and Australia have experimented with and, predictably, it blew up in the media companies faces. While Canada and Australia are two different countries, the story is quite similar. Since I know more about Canada’s story than Australia’s story, I’ll lead with Canada’s story.

In Canada, lobbyists pushed the link tax hard. Media companies began dishonestly “reporting” (re: lying) that Meta is somehow “stealing” news content. If you think that this is hyperbole, I can show you the fact that they went to the extreme measure of even creating and posting up posters to broadcast this lie as hard as possible:

So, what did the media companies actually mean when they argued that Meta was “stealing” news articles? This actually varies, but one lie was that Meta was “scraping” whole news articles, republishing on their platform, slapping their own ads on it, and making off with the revenues afterwards. There are two large problems with this lie. First of all, out of the hundreds of articles the media companies pushed out, none of them actually provided any evidence that this is actually what is happening. A second problem is that even if this is what was happening, you don’t need any additional laws because this would be a violation of already existing copyright law. For that, media companies could file a DMCA complaint or a general copyright infringement lawsuit for that. Mysteriously, every time I brought the idea of suing for copyright infringement, apologists never had a response to this – likely because they knew this was a huge lie that had zero evidence to back it up.

The more common variation was to simply vaguely say that they are “stealing” and hoping that “just trust me, bro” was going to be sufficient. When pressed, however, there was a general admission that said that what they mean by “stealing” is that they were allowing links to be published. As anyone with any basic knowledge of writing papers know, linking is the internet’s equivalent of citing sources. Citing sources is most assuredly not copyright infringement, nor would any sane person think of this as “stealing”. The charge has no backing and to punctuate the point that this was a ridiculous claim, it is very well known that it is the media companies themselves that are responsible for most of those links winding up on platforms like Facebook in the first place.

Ultimately, these lies got repeated over the years and it is what I termed “Big Lie 1.0“. This lie was frequently coupled with the completely fabricated notion that platforms like Facebook completely depend on news links in the first place. Most of these comments were backed with the ever flimsy “just trust me, bro”, but sometimes, the propagandists utilized a technique known as cherry picking where they would cherry pick data and erase all context. In this instance, they cherry picked some data that said something along the lines of “certain percentage of users get their news from Facebook” and conclude that platforms completely depend on news links. The context that is intentionally removed is the fact that people who get news links from Facebook are frequently doing so on a passive level. This is by scrolling through their feeds and if they find the link interesting, they click it. Otherwise, they’ll keep scrolling. If news links disappeared, it wouldn’t stop those users from continuing to scroll, it was just an added benefit to their scrolling.

For the media companies and their lobbyists pals, this was picture proof that proved that platforms wholly depended on news links for their survival. They claimed that without news links, platforms would just fold up tomorrow because users simply wouldn’t have anything to talk about anymore. In what has to be one of the few times the company was actually honest about things, Meta explained that they don’t depend on news links for their business as their platform is about people communicating with each other, not necessarily for the sole purpose of making news content easier to access. So, in response, they said that if they are forced to pay publishers for the privilege of sending traffic over to said publishers, Meta would rather drop news links altogether.

The media companies, in their infinite capacity to lie, said that it was all just a big fancy bluff and that the government should pass the link tax anyway. This, they argued, was because Meta would totally knuckle under and come to heel because they would have no choice but to work out “deals”. This is because they are wholly dependent on news links thanks to the house of cards they built to justify everything.

When the lobbyists realized that the company was actually speaking for real about their decision to block news links, the media companies rolled out what I called “Big Lie 2.0“. That lie, of course, being that Meta is somehow “censoring” news publishers altogether in their decision to block news links on their platform. The lie made absolutely no sense for a variety of reasons.

First, do the media companies want news links on their platform or not? Either the publishers are unhappy about their news links being on their platform because of “stealing” and they would be happy that the links are getting removed or they want their news links on the platform because it gives them traffic and they knew that would be forced to admit their initial charges were complete and total lies. Pick a lane and stick with it because you can’t have it both ways. Either Meta is “stealing” or they are not. While the media companies simply couldn’t make up their minds about whether Meta was “stealing” or “censoring”, Meta had already made up their minds and dropped news links back in 2023. The Canadian link tax was a failure and, to this day, news links were never restored in Canada.

One of the things that Meta said during the debate, however, was that they were going to be ending their “deals” with Australian publishers. This was after they were asked during the hearings, Meta said that they would be dropping news links in Australia as well. It was pretty obvious why. As I’ve argued in the past, Meta agreeing to sign the deals back in the early 2020’s was a huge mistake because every other country was going to want their pound of flesh as well. Meta likely believed that they could just pay off one country and raise the barriers for any other company trying to enter into the social media landscape. Our prediction came true in a very big way because Canada, the US, and several European nations also pushed their own respective link tax laws. It was only after this started happening that Meta started reversing on their position of link taxes in the first place.

Ultimately, Meta did block news links in 2024 and the Australian lawmakers who were pushing this in the first place were left completely humiliated. Once pointed to as a world leader, their flagship bad internet policy went down in flames. Not only were media companies watching their house of cards worth of lies blow away in the wind, but they were also finding out that they had managed to kick themselves off of large social media platforms in the process, making a bad situation worse for themselves. It was official: link taxes have failed.

Realistically, I didn’t think that there was anywhere else for this story to go apart from the laws getting rescinded with the government retreating with their tails tucked between their legs. Unfortunately, I found out today that the Australian government isn’t yet done humiliating themselves.

In what has to be a true example of “it can always get dumber”, the Australian government appears to be proposing what I can, for the time being, only describe as an existence tax. The idea, of course, is that because Meta dropped news links, the company would be charged an additional tax for the crime of not carrying news links. From Tech Crunch:

Australia is getting serious about making Big Tech pay for news. The country’s government unveiled draft legislation on Tuesday that would require companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok to pay for the journalism they aggregate or reshare, or face a levy on their local revenues.

Communications minister Anika Wells said at a press conference today: “People are increasingly getting their news directly from Facebook, from TikTok, and from Google.”

The proposed law, called the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), would impose a 2.25% levy on the Australian revenues of the three platforms unless they strike commercial deals with local news publishers. Plus, the more deals they make with media outlets, the less they pay. If enough agreements go through, that effective rate drops to 1.5%, which could generate between A$200 million and A$250 million back into Australian journalism.

What is hilarious in this is the fact that Meta dropping news links was classified as a “flaw” in the Australian News Bargaining Code. No, really:

It is the country’s second attempt to force Big Tech to fund journalism. The Australian government introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, which officially came into effect in 2021, requiring platforms like Google and Meta to pay news publishers. But the original version had a flaw that Big Tech companies could simply remove news from their platforms to avoid paying. Meta did that in 2024, and that move, reportedly, triggered widespread job cuts across Australian newsrooms.

The level of entitlement shown here is absolutely staggering. The option for Meta to drop news links instead of paying a licensing fee isn’t a “flaw”, it’s a logical aspect in all of this. Let’s put it another way, if you want your store to sell alcohol, but the government is imposing a licensing fee for the privilege of doing so, the store has two options: pay the license fee or stop selling alcohol. If the store decides to stop selling alcohol, it would be unreasonable for the government to tax that company for failing to sell alcohol. No sane person is arguing that the store is somehow obligated to sell alcohol no matter what.

This is precisely the thing that Meta did. They opted to drop news links when the media companies were demanding free money. In response, the government, working in lockstep with the media companies, argued that Meta is somehow obligated to allow the sharing of news links and also be required to pay the media companies on top of it all for the privilege of utilizing that obligation.

Let’s call a spade a spade here. The media companies are demanding free money from Meta. They want a free lunch in all of this and they will go to any extreme to make it happen. I don’t know about Australian law, but in both Canada and the United States, this would very easily be considered unconstitutional and the government would be dragged through the courts and taken through the legal ringer for such a stunt. If that’s not an option, then Meta can also just block the country entirely – no doubt to the whining of the media companies who get the wrong impression that this would hurt Meta because they would lose audiences from the nation in the first place.

Everything about the News Bargaining Incentive is stupid. I legitimately thought that when Canadian publishers argued that screenshots made Meta liable under the Online News Act despite the fact that there was no such provision to be had about this in the first place, this would be peak stupidity. Worth noting is the fact that this stupid effort, as of this writing, went nowhere. This “incentive”, somehow, reaches a whole new level of stupidity.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.