Australia Forces Tech Giants to Pay for News, and Nine's CEO Thinks AI Makes That Bet Bigger
New Australian laws could make Google and Meta pay levies if they don't cut deals with local newsrooms. Nine Entertainment's boss says it opens a 'world of growth' even as the company trims $160 million in costs.
Key points
- Australia's parliament passed updated media bargaining laws last week, allowing levies on global tech platforms that won't pay for Australian journalism.
- Nine Entertainment, the broadcaster and publisher behind mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald, is targeting $160 million in cost cuts.
- Nine's chief executive Matt Stanton says the company has a "good pipeline" of AI-related commercial deals in the works.
- The laws are designed to force platforms like Google and Meta into paid agreements with Australian news outlets.
What did Australia just change?
Parliament passed new media bargaining laws last week that give Australian news outlets a new lever: if a global tech platform refuses to pay for Australian journalism it uses, the government can hit that platform with a levy. Think of it as a toll booth the tech giants cannot simply drive around.
The original bargaining code, introduced in 2021, pushed Google and Meta toward voluntary deals with Australian publishers. The revised version tightens the screws, making a financial penalty the default for platforms that walk away from negotiations.
What does Nine Entertainment get out of this?
Nine's chief executive, Matt Stanton, is optimistic. Stanton told journalists the company sees a "world of growth in publishing" ahead, backed by these laws and by a "good pipeline" of AI-related commercial deals the company is working through.
The logic is straightforward. AI systems, the software behind tools like ChatGPT that read and summarise vast amounts of online text, depend on journalism as raw material. If Australian law forces tech companies to pay for that material, publishers like Nine collect the cheque.
First reported by The Guardian, Stanton's comments came even as Nine announced a push to cut $160 million from its costs, a sign that confidence in future revenue does not mean the present is easy.
Should ordinary readers care about any of this?
Yes, and here is why. Local journalism costs money to produce. Investigations, court reporting, council coverage: none of it happens without reporters being paid. If tech platforms contribute to those costs, newsrooms can theoretically stay bigger and better staffed than they would otherwise be.
The flip side is that platforms might simply choose to surface less Australian news rather than pay. That is the gamble baked into the law.
For now, Nine is betting the pipeline of AI deals will materialise before the cost cuts bite too hard.
What happens next?
The levy mechanism still needs to be set up in practice, and the big platforms have not yet said publicly how they will respond. Tech companies have shown before, in Canada for example, that they are willing to restrict news content rather than pay for it. Australia is testing whether a harder legal threat changes that calculus.
Watching whether Google or Meta strike deals or fight back will tell us a lot about how AI-era content laws work everywhere else too.
Common questions
Do these laws affect what I see on Google or Facebook?
Potentially yes. If platforms decide to pay the levies rather than strike deals, nothing changes for users. If they pull back from surfacing Australian news to avoid the rules, you may see less local journalism in your feeds.
Why does AI make this more urgent?
AI tools are trained on, and often summarise, published journalism without direct payment to the outlets that produced it. The more valuable that content becomes to AI companies, the more the question of who gets paid for it matters.
