SYDNEY (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. reached a content supply deal with Facebook Inc. in Australia, companies said on Tuesday, a step towards resolving a dispute that saw the social media giant close briefly thousands of pages in the country.
The deal, which did not disclose its terms, makes News Corp the first major media outlet to reach a Facebook deal under controversial new laws that allow an arbitrator appointed by the Australian government to set rates if the companies don’t.
Facebook shut down all of the country’s media content for a week last month and angered world leaders as the shutdown included emergency services and government health pages. The closure ended when Australia agreed to soften some parts of the new regulations.
News Corp, which owns about two-thirds of Australian metropolitan newspapers, was among the media companies asking the government for Google and Facebook from Alphabet Inc to pay for media links that drive viewers and advertising dollars to their platforms.
Google had also been opposed for months and threatened, like Facebook, to withdraw basic services from the country, before signing agreements with most media outlets (including News Corp) in the days before the rules became law.
“The deal with Facebook is a milestone in the transformation of trade terms for journalism and will have a material and significant impact on our Australian business,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement thank the Australian Prime Minister, Treasurer and Chief Antitrust Regulator for name.
The head of Facebook’s news associations in Australia, Andrew Hunter, said the deal meant that the country’s 17 million Facebook users “will have access to press articles and breaking news videos from the News Corp’s network of national, metropolitan, rural and suburban newsrooms. “
In addition to the country’s best-selling newspapers The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and The Herald-Sun in Melbourne, News runs a subscription cable television network called Sky News, which signed a separate agreement on Facebook, the terms of which are not disclosed. reported, according to News Corp.
News Corp was the first to say it reached an agreement with Facebook, but television and newspaper publisher Seven West Media Ltd, which broadcast for free, has already said it signed a letter of intent to do so. -ho.
On Tuesday, seven rivals of Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Ltd reported to the Australian Financial Review that it had also signed a letter of intent for a Facebook deal.
“I’ve always had the vision we need to see it play out,” Rod Sims, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the architect of the new laws, said in a telephone interview.
“If they have made a deal with News Corp., they are obviously at the heart of making deals with others.”
A Nine spokesman said the company, which also publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, “will continue to have constructive and fruitful conversations with Facebook (and) when we have something to announce that we will.”
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the Nou negotiations.
Reports of Byron Kaye in Sydney and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Edited by Shinjini Ganguli and Gerry Doyle