Redirecting surveillance capitalism: Facebook and Australia’s news media bargaining code

Facebook’s response to the draft News Media Bargaining Code (the Code) proposed by Australia’s Morrison government in February 2021 made digital and corporate history. The Silicon Valley behemoth, with an operating rationale to manipulate and commodify human relations for profit, decided to make an example of a sovereign country. It did so by barring, blanking and scraping information broadly defined as news content from the pages of Australian organisations and entities hosted on the company’s site. Along with Google, Facebook reasoned that the Code imposed an ill-conceived arbitration model to determine revenue for news organisations using their platforms. News organisations, hoping to recoup classified and ad revenue lost to the platforms, argued for greater bargaining powers in negotiating with Facebook and Google. The Code is underpinned by erroneous assumptions regarding market practices pertaining to digital platforms, entrenching the very problems it claims to address. The developments suggested ‘the curious role of the bargaining code: it’s meant to operate as a legislative threat so arbitration only happens when platforms and news outlets can’t agree. If Google keeps handing out money, this is unlikely to happen’ (Meese, 2021). With agreed government amendments made to the Code on Facebook’s ‘refriending’ of Australia (Frydenberg, 2021), two victorious parties emerged: the digital platforms and old news media.