He had been in direct contact with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and, he thought, was making progress toward an accommodation over proposed rules that would force the tech titan to pay publishers to link to their news.
Then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull wanted to relax media merger-and-acquisition laws to let Australian news outlets like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp scale up and survive a revenue crash as advertisers took their business to internet heavyweights like Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google. "If there is a viable rival to Facebook in years to come, its genesis will be the event that occurred in Australia on the 18th of February," he told Reuters. "Facebook has exposed the level of its market power. It's behaving like a monopoly."
He left it to Australian media and Big Tech to thrash out a framework to negotiate the price of links that draw clicks - and advertising dollars - to their platforms. When that failed the ACCC stepped in, saying it would appoint an arbitrator to set fees in the event of stalemate, a model suggested by News Corp.
As the bill moved through and passed the lower house, Google struck deals with free-to-air network Seven West Media Ltd and rival Nine Entertainment Co Holdings, which also owns the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age newspapers. As Google turned conciliatory and the bill looked set to become law next week, it was Facebook's turn.
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