Australia’s tech giants tax: systemic imbalance in media funding demands structural reform, not just revenue extraction
Original framing: “Albanese government’s latest attempt to make tech giants pay for journalism is needed but carries big risks” — The Conversation - Global
The crisis stems from the 1980s deregulation of media ownership (e.g., Hawke-Keating reforms) and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which enabled platform monopolies while gutting public media funding. The 2017 News Media Bargaining Code in Australia set a precedent for forcing platforms to pay, but it failed to address the root cause: the collapse of local journalism due to ad revenue flight to Google and Meta. Globally, similar patterns emerged in the U.S. with the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the UK’s 2010 Localism Act.
The Albanese government’s push to tax tech giants reflects a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collapse of democratic media under neoliberalism.
For decades, deregulation enabled platform monopolies to extract value from journalism while state funding for public media was slashed—a pattern repeated globally from the U.S. to India. The current debate, however, frames this as a zero-sum game between publishers and platforms, ignoring how both sectors are products of the same extractive logic. Indigenous media models and cooperative ownership offer a path forward, but require dismantling the platform oligopoly through algorithmic transparency and revenue redistribution. The solution lies not in tinkering with profit-sharing, but in reimagining media as a commons, where power is decentralized and communities—not algorithms—determine what counts as news. This demands a constitutional commitment to media pluralism, akin to the right to free expression, ensuring journalism serves the public, not shareholders.