BotW: The platforms recruit Trump for their fight with Australia
Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off in the Quantum1 departure lounge in Sydney and wrapped up this morning at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today: Donald Trump is looking for fights, and the platforms are pointing him towards Australia; Shenanigans over the Domain share price; autocorrect strikes again.
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The gathering storm
One of the many fascinating things about Donald Trump’s war on America’s friends is that you can wake up never having heard the name of organisation that’s going to dominate the day’s agenda.
Yesterday was one of those days. The Office of the United States Trade Representative is one of those bodies. And so is the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
And yet these two organisations are playing a key role in what Australia does next around forcing the platforms to fund Australian news companies. Or not.
Last month, USTR kicked off a trawling exercise on behalf of Donald Trump, who is actively looking for fights with Australia’s former allies. It asked for “comments to assist in reviewing and identifying unfair trade practices and initiating all necessary actions to investigate harm from non-reciprocal trade arrangements”.
In other words: Give us the excuse for more tariffs.
The CCIA was happy to oblige. Funded by the tech industry, with the inoffensive slogan “Open markets. Open Systems. Open Networks,” the CCIA pointed to the Albanese government’s proposed News Media Bargaining Incentive .
This was the proposal put forward by communications minister Michelle Rowland and outgoing treasury minister Stephen Jones late last year.
The incentive won’t be legislated this side of the Federal election. In the unlikely event it becomes law, it would see platforms which bring in Australian revenues of at least $250m per year pay a levy unless they offset that by entering commercial deals with news publishers.
Although there’s not yet any detail on how that would work in practice, the platforms are not wasting any time in lobbying Trump against it.
The creation of the News Media Bargaining Code under the Coalition government in 2021 was the biggest collective failure of lobbying the tech platforms have seen. Google and Facebook ended up doing multi-million dollar deals to subsidise the big news players to avoid being designated under the code. This rare defeat for the tax-minimising, regulation-dodging platform complex echoed around the world as other jurisdictions including Canada and New Zealand contemplated similar laws.
The platforms are not going to make the same mistake twice, and the arrival of a Trump-led White House whose policy settings are for sale, has given them a perfect opportunity to fight off any more precedent-setting legislation.
It will be fascinating to see whether these trade war rumblings change the position of Labor as it enters the election. The initial response from Michelle Rowland’s office yesterday was this:
“Our digital policies apply equally to all companies operating in Australia regardless of which country they are based in. We will continue to stand up for Australia’s interests.
“The Albanese government’s proposed Incentive is an enforcement mechanism of an existing law – the News Media Bargaining Code, that was legislated by the Coalition government in 2021.
“It is designed to encourage big digital platforms to continue to enter into deals with news media organisations.
“While some US companies may be captured under the incentive, others are expected to benefit from the commercial deals encouraged by the incentive.”
Certainly not a change of the policy at this stage.
Meanwhile, the CCIA wasn’t the only one to join the witch hunt. There was also a bad-faith submission from the Motion Pictures Association.
The MPA accurately pointed out that Labor had previously flagged introducing quotas for the video on demand streaming services similar to the local free to air networks.
“The Albanese Government in its 2023 National Cultural Policy outlined a commitment to introduce an investment obligation for VOD services by July 2024. Such a mandate would be violative of Australia’s FTA commitments to the United States. To date, there is no evidence to support any assertion of a market failure. Indeed, the data on investment in Australian content for streaming services continues to indicate high levels of production and wide availability for subscribers. There remains no need for consideration of quotas or obligations to invest in local content.”
But the MPA failed to point out that the government later dropped the policy when the free to air networks panicked that it would drive up the market cost of production for them too.
Instead, it will all become another excuse for the trade war.
Unmade Index: Domain inexpertise
A convenient leak to Nine’s Australian Financial Review that Nine is pushing for a price of $4.65 per share for its 60% stake in Domain didn’t do much to move the market yesterday.
Three days after Capital Brief reported “intrigue” over the lack of a formal response from Nine to CoStar’s offer, the AFR report filled the information vacuum but failed to budge the share price.
However, the market does not appear to believe Nine is close to getting that higher price. Domain shares instead stayed stubbornly flat on $4.34 yesterday, just above the $4.20 currently on the table.
Elsewhere on the Unmade Index, Seven West Media had a good day, gaining 6.45%.
Out-of-home minnow Motio gained 11.5%, and Pureprofile lifted 5.4%.
Sports Entertainment group took a 9.5% spanking, while Enero Group lost another 5.7%. Enero is now trading at its lowest point since 2015.
The Unmade Index, which tracks all of Australia’s listed media and marketing stocks, rose yesterday, gaining 0.3% to land on 547.8 points.
Dr Spin: A Qantas of solace
Dr Spin writes:
Dr Spin observed a degree of confusion on the Guardian’s live blog early this morning.
Coverage of the Heathrow chaos included a report of poor old Joshua Richardson flying in from the up-and-coming Perth suburb of Quantum.
Other publications carrying that same PA News report mentioned the passenger flying on Qantas. Thank you, auto correct.
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like to hear more about the coming platforms-fuelled trade war, we talk about it in this week’s episode of MediaLand from ABC Radio National, which is available in all the usual podcast places. Vivienne Kelly and I also discuss pollies’ pre-poll podcast push, and the Edelman Trust Barometer report.
We’ll be back with more next week.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Yes, that’s a joke. Read the whole post
😊