With Australians about to lose their local and metropolitan newspaper coverage, the competition watchdog sent to the rescue is facing the prospect of litigation from tech giants Google and Facebook.

This became clear as Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims told The New Daily the ACCC now had “considerable vital and urgent” work to be done to develop the world’s first mandatory news media revenue sharing laws.

The draft laws will be ready by July and are likely to be legislated with bipartisan parliamentary support later this year.

The laws will stipulate that digital platforms, which include the market dominant Google and Facebook, will have to comply with “the monetisation and the sharing of revenue generated from news through data sharing, ranking and display of news”.

But because the laws will mandate “revenue sharing” rather than a European “Google tax “ or an “aggregators’ fee” imposed in Spain, the ACCC has asked its legal advisers to frame the legislation in anticipation of a legal challenge in the Federal Court – and ultimately the High Court – to test competition and copyright law in Australia.

Any precedent established in Australia is likely to have flow-on effects in all other jurisdictions worldwide.

Google and Facebook, both United States enterprises, have devastated American local and metropolitan media – leading to closures of print mastheads across the US after collapsing ad revenues, rapid circulation declines, dramatically depleted local coverage and the vaporising of thousands of media industry jobs.

There has been little or nothing traditional print media companies in the US have been able to do about it.



But under the proposed new laws here the Australian Communications and Media Authority will be the assigned digital platform regulator with enforcement powers through fines and copyright “take down” orders.

The ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry last year, the most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken, recommended requirements for “designated agents of digital platforms” to be available during Australian business hours and for bulk notifications to stop and penalise repeated infringements.