SYDNEY (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. reached an agreement to deliver content with Facebook Inc. in Australia, the companies said Tuesday, a step towards a dispute in which the social media giant briefly closed thousands of pages in the country.
The agreement, the terms of which have not been disclosed, makes News Corp the first major media outlet to close a Facebook deal under controversial new laws that allow an Australian government-appointed arbitrator to set fees if companies fail to do so.
Facebook shut down all media content in the country for a week last month, angered world leaders as the power outage included emergency services and government health pages. It ended the shutdown when Australia agreed to soften some parts of the new regulations.
News Corp, which owns about two-thirds of Australia’s metropolitan newspapers, was one of the media companies that called on the government to make Alphabet Inc’s Facebook and Google pay for the media links that direct viewers and advertising dollars to their platforms.
Google had also objected and threatened, like Facebook, for months to withdraw core services from the country, before signing agreements with most media outlets – including News Corp – in the days before the rules took effect.
“The agreement with Facebook is a milestone in the transformation of journalism trading conditions and will have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses,” said Robert Thomson, News Corp CEO, in a statement calling the Australian Prime Minister, Treasurer and chief antitrust regulator by name.
Andrew Hunter, Facebook’s chief of news partnerships in Australia, said the deal meant that Facebook’s 17 million users in the country “will have access to premium news articles and breaking news videos from News Corp’s network of national, metropolitan, rural and suburban newsrooms. “.
In addition to the country’s best-selling tabloids, The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and The Herald-Sun in Melbourne, News operates a cable TV subscription called Sky News, which struck a separate Facebook deal, the terms of which were not disclosed. according to News Corp.
News Corp was the first to say it struck a Facebook deal, but free television broadcaster and newspaper publisher Seven West Media Ltd has previously said it has signed a letter of intent to do so.
On Tuesday, Seven’s rival Nine Entertainment Co Holdings Ltd reported in the Australian Financial Review that it had also signed a letter of intent for a Facebook deal.
“I’ve always taken the view that we need to see this happen,” Rod Sims, chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the architect of the new laws, said in a telephone interview.
“If they have a deal with News Corp, they are clearly in the mood to make deals with others.”
A spokesman for Nine said the company, which also publishes the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, “continues to have constructive and fruitful conversations with Facebook (and) if we have anything to say, we will.”
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the nine negotiations.
Reporting by Byron Kaye in Sydney and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Adaptation by Shinjini Ganguli and Gerry Doyle