LINA welcomes the News Bargaining Incentive as a necessary government intervention to address market power imbalance, and supports the structure of the Incentive as a whole. Further, LINA supports the Incentive as an action by the government to ensure that the code is reinforced in a way that cannot be circumvented by digital platforms withdrawing news content.
However, LINA is concerned that as drafted, the News Bargaining Incentive could have market-distorting effects that particularly impact independent publishers. The Incentive risks entrenching media concentration in Australia, already one of the most concentrated media markets in the world. Anti-competitive measures would disadvantage new players entering the market, making news deserts permanent and giving digital platforms undue influence in Australia’s democracy.
These risks could be mitigated with non-substantive changes to the proposed legislation in the drafting process, outlined in this submission. These changes would align the policy more closely with the News Media Assistance Program (News MAP) framework, but would not impact the structure of the Incentive nor the quantum of the obligations required of digital platforms.
As the legislation is currently drafted, LINA notes that around one-third of its members are ineligible to participate in the News Bargaining Incentive by revenue-test, a further approximate one-third is ineligible due to capacity constraints, leaving approximately one-third of LINA member publishers likely beneficiaries from the Incentive. As a support-based organisation, LINA intends to assist its members to engage with bargaining processes under the Code to the extent that our resourcing and the capacity of our member publishers allows. This submission seeks a pathway to participation for a broad range of news providers, enabling increased media diversity and strengthening public interest journalism.
Summary of key recommendations
The submission proposes the following amendments to the News Bargaining Incentive:
- Require at least 25% of eligible expenditure apply to small and medium business entities;
- Increase the offset rate for small and medium business entities to +200%;
- Remove the $150k revenue threshold for engagement with the News Media Bargaining Code; and
- Remove exclusions of LLMs and business/professional networking from search and social media service definitions.
