The shark tank

This week saw a renewed call for the Australian government to move ahead with the proposed news bargaining incentive, with Nine CEO Matt Stanton noting the significant challenge media companies face from global tech giants and AI in his half-year presentation to shareholders. The proposal would close a loophole in the existing bargaining code by imposing a levy on large platforms that can be offset by forging deals with news companies. Media companies, and others, including former ACCC chair Rod Sims and us at the CMT, have called for the government to consider including generative AI within the scope of the incentive.

The proposal,  appeared to stall when the Trump administration threatened to impose tariffs on Australian imports soon after taking office as part of a broad campaign to protect US commercial interests. Trump has repeatedly called out efforts to regulate US technology companies, suggesting that regulation—particularly through enforcement measures like fines—acts as a tax on those companies and as, in effect, a transfer of funds from the US to foreign governments or ‘their favoured domestic entities’.

Of course, large companies can be expected to lobby governments to protect their commercial interests, as media companies do here—and, of course, in the US. The difference in the US is that tech companies are worth a whole lot more, and have much more lobbying power, than media companies, despite the agenda-setting power of the latter.

The second prong of Trump’s attacks on tech regulation rides—often disingenuously—on the free-speech hobby horse. When the European Commission announced in December that it would fine X Corp 120 million Euros for breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Trump administration immediately framed it as an attack on individual liberties. According to secretary of state Marco Rubio, the fine was an attack not only ‘on all American tech platforms’, but on the ‘American people’. X head Elon Musk called for the abolition of the EU.

One might assume from this rhetoric that the fine was issued for X’s refusal to address, and indeed active encouragement of, misinformation and hate speech. In fact, the fine did not relate to user content at all, but was imposed for deceptive conduct and transparency violations. These included changes to the platform’s ‘blue tick’, which allowed users to purchase account verification and as a result, an appearance of authenticity; failure to provide adequate transparency over ads served on the platform, including who paid for them; and failure to facilitate data access for researchers. X has appealed the penalty.

Some US media companies lazily echoed this narrative, with NBC calling the DSA a sweeping law that ‘requires internet companies to aggressively combat hate speech and misinformation’. But the DSA is largely focused on transparency and accountability measures, with content-based regulation occurring instead mostly through voluntary codes of conduct that are tied somewhat loosely to the obligation under the DSA to undertake risk assessments and manage identified risks.

It’s unclear how some media companies will reconcile their own commercial interests—which clearly favour tech regulation—with their ideological positioning on free speech. The conflation of accountability with censorship is familiar from Australia’s owned failed bid to regulate misinformation. Unfortunately, like Sydney’s beaches after rain, the muddied waters that result provide perfect cover for the predacious.