Meta has reached for a bigger weapon. The company accused the Australian government of breaching the US-Australia free trade agreement with its proposed News Bargaining Incentive, and pointed Washington towards the “trade action” it has taken against other countries that taxed American technology firms. The dispute over paying for news, now in its fifth year, has stopped being only about news.The mechanism at the centre of it is a levy of 2.25% of total Australian revenue, applied to large platforms including Meta, Google, and TikTok that fail to strike content licensing deals with local news organisations.
Meta’s objection is partly to the base. The tax falls on total Australian revenue, not on revenue tied to news, which the company argues taxes unrelated income to force an outcome.
Meta’s sharper claim is legal. The proposal, it wrote, “plainly violates the commitments Australia and the United States made in their bilateral Free Trade Agreement,” which it says obliges Australia to give American companies “treatment no less favourable” than their Australian peers.
The company called the measure “indefensible” and said it went further than digital services taxes elsewhere that had already drawn a US response.
