The Albanese government released draft legislation Tuesday for a "News Bargaining Incentive" — a 2.25% levy on the Australian revenue of Meta, Google, and TikTok that applies whether or not those platforms carry news. [1] Companies that strike commercial deals with Australian news publishers receive offsets against the levy, with larger offsets for deals struck with smaller, regional outlets. The draft is open for public consultation in May, with introduction to Parliament targeted by July 2. [1]

The structure is what makes this story international rather than domestic. The 2021 News Media Bargaining Code was a designation regime: platforms designated as bargaining parties had to negotiate or face arbitration. Meta refused to renew its deals, declined to be designated, and walked away from approximately A$70 million per year in payments to Australian publishers. [2] The 2.25% levy designed for 2026 reverses the architecture. The platforms cannot evade the obligation by stripping news, because the revenue base is total Australian revenue, not news-adjacent revenue. The bargaining is the offset, not the obligation.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said journalism needed "monetary value attached to it" and that "large digital platforms cannot avoid their obligations under the news media bargaining code." [3] Communications Minister Anika Wells said the proceeds would be redistributed to news organizations based on "how many journalists each organization employed." [4] The threshold is A$250 million in Australian revenue. The expected raise is A$200 million to A$250 million annually — about what platforms paid at the peak of the original code. [4]

Meta's response read the draft accurately. "This proposed legislation, which would apply to platforms regardless of whether news content even appears on our services, is nothing more than a digital services tax," the company said. [4] The label is correct in tax-policy terms. France's GAFA tax, the EU's stalled Digital Services Tax proposals, and the OECD Pillar One framework all operate on similar architecture: revenue-based levies that platforms cannot avoid by altering product behavior.

Google's response was a separate complaint about company selection. "It mandates payments from some companies while arbitrarily excluding platforms like Microsoft, Snapchat, and OpenAI," Google said. [3] The exclusions are real. Microsoft's LinkedIn and Bing are below the threshold or fall under a different category; Snapchat is below threshold; the draft explicitly carves out "artificial intelligence services that solely use large language models to provide answers to questions or other information." [5] That carve-out — protecting Gemini, Meta AI, and ChatGPT from the levy when accessed as direct question-answering services — is the more interesting concession.

The AI carve-out matters because it preserves the levy's targeting on the social-feed and search-distribution surface where Australian news organizations historically gained traffic. By exempting AI assistants, Canberra has chosen to leave the OpenAI-class news-summarization risk for a future legislative cycle. The current bill's targeted surface is Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, YouTube, and TikTok.

The international consequence is the precedent. The draft is the most explicit version of the "negotiate or pay" framework yet legislated, with a defined percentage rate rather than an open-ended arbitration mechanism. [5] EU member states watching Australian legislative outcomes will read the bill's design as a template that survives Meta's 2024 strategy of news-stripping. The European Commission's stalled Digital Services Tax proposal could be revived using the Australian rate as a reference point.

The U.S. response has been muted. Albanese was asked about potential pushback from Washington and replied: "We're a sovereign nation and my government will make decisions based upon the Australian national interest." [3] The Trump administration has not yet publicly commented on the draft. The trade-policy ambiguity sits inside the broader Section 301 framework that the administration has activated against other countries' digital-services taxes. The Australian legislation's structure — bargaining offsets rather than direct revenue capture — gives the platforms an offramp the administration may find harder to label as discriminatory.

The Coalition opposition has signaled support for the principle, with reservations about distribution. [6] The Greens have called for a broader "big tech tax" raising A$11.5 billion from companies "that monetise Australians' personal data and shift profits offshore." [3] The bargaining-code consensus that produced the 2021 framework — Coalition government, Labor support — is rebuilding around the 2026 levy with one party arguing for breadth.

What the draft tests is whether a foreign government can convert news production into a regulated levy when the platforms have demonstrated they would rather strip the product than pay. The 2021 code answered no — platforms could walk away. The 2026 levy is designed to answer yes — platforms cannot. The May consultation period and the July introduction are the calendar on which that answer is rendered. [4]

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels