18 August 2026

What publishers can learn from Australia’s battle with the platforms

Former Australian Communications Minister Paul Fletcher reflects on the News Media Bargaining Code, platform power and why AI is reopening questions about the value of publisher content.

When Australia introduced its News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, it was responding to a problem publishers around the world were grappling with: technology platforms were deriving value from journalism without agreeing a price with the businesses producing it.

Paul Fletcher was Australia’s Communications Minister at the time. The legislation ultimately led to commercial deals between major platforms and Australian media businesses, with an estimated A$200 million flowing to publishers over the following years.

For Paul, the broader lesson is that governments can intervene in markets dominated by global technology companies: “If governments are serious about it, they can get outcomes,” he says.

At FIPP World Media Congress, he and publisher Ricky Sutton will draw on that experience to explore the relationship between publishers, platforms and politics – and what it might tell us about the next set of challenges facing media businesses.

Why intervene at all?

The News Media Bargaining Code was designed to require Google and Facebook to negotiate with Australian news organisations over the use of their content.

Paul acknowledges that government involvement in what would normally be commercial negotiations was unusual: “We treated it as a competition policy issue.”

The argument was that the platforms had such significant market power that normal commercial negotiations were not taking place. “In an ordinary market, if it were not for the enormous market power that Google and Facebook have, they would have sat down with the newspaper publishers and the television networks and the radio broadcasters to strike commercial deals with them,” Paul says.

But the case for intervention went beyond competition. “In any liberal democracy, you have an interest in there being a diverse and vigorous media sector.”

Privately owned media businesses depend on sustainable sources of revenue, while journalism also plays a broader role in public life. “It was economic policy, it was media policy, and it was the policy interest in a vigorous liberal democracy.”

Making the rules stick

The Australian experience also demonstrates that introducing regulation is only part of the job.

“We were very careful and methodical in the way we dealt with this,” Paul says. “The first thing we did was get the competition regulator to do a very serious study of the market.”

That work examined areas including advertising and the market power held by the major platforms, before the government spent more than a year developing its response. “Taking the time to do a very thorough job was an important reason why we ultimately had the success we did.”

Crucially, the resulting code also carried consequences if commercial negotiations failed. That, Paul argues, gave the rules credibility. “You also have to have a government that’s prepared to enforce its own laws.”

For publishers looking at the experience from elsewhere in the world, he believes there is a broader lesson: “With the right degree of policy focus and with careful design of the policy, you can establish a framework that the digital platforms have no choice but to comply with if they want to do business in your country.”

Keeping pace with technology

There is, of course, a fundamental difficulty in regulating technology: the market can change dramatically in the time it takes to research, develop and introduce policy.

Paul accepts the tension – the Australian competition regulator’s initial investigation took around two years, while publishers continued to feel the effects of the platforms’ growing market power – but he argues that taking time to build the evidence ultimately strengthened the response: “First best is to respond quickly, but second best is to respond more slowly, but still to respond.”

It also reflects a wider shift in how governments approach the internet. For years, Paul says, policymakers were uncertain about how – or whether – existing regulatory principles could be applied to global technology businesses operating across borders.

That, he says, has changed. “The idea that if it’s on the internet, it’s beyond the reach of the government of the country that you live in – most people think that’s a ridiculous idea.”

AI reopens the question

The challenge publishers face today is already different from the one Australia was addressing in 2021. Generative AI has now raised a new version of the question: what happens when systems draw on journalism publishers have paid to produce, without necessarily sending users to the source?

For Paul, that raises questions about “who has the copyright in that text, and whether the AI that’s being used is effectively breaching the intellectual property rights of the news publishers who employed the journalists who wrote those stories.”

He is wary of the argument that the global nature or speed of technological development means individual governments are powerless to respond.

“We were constantly being told by the global digital platforms, ‘Your country can’t regulate this. This is a global issue,’” he says.

“The lesson to draw is that government ought not be intimidated by these arguments.”

Standing out in a wall of content

Regulation will form one part of Paul and Ricky’s discussion at Congress. The other side is what media businesses can do to demonstrate the value of what they produce.

“If you’re Facebook, you don’t really care whether it’s a cat video or whether it’s a deeply researched article on economic decay in the Midlands,” Paul says. “If they get people on the platform, that’s all you care about.”

Publishers, by contrast, need to “differentiate based upon your content and what’s going to appeal to people”. Their businesses also typically have, he says, “a much stronger geographical identity and sense of connection with a place” than global platforms.

“As we seek to differentiate against this wall of content, much of it generated by artificial intelligence and not by humans,” Paul says, publishers need to ask: “What are the business and marketing strategies that are going to help us demonstrate to our readers, our viewers, our listeners what differentiates our content from what’s available on all these platforms?”

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