Australia’s competition and consumer regulator has announced it is investigating digital giants Google and Facebook to assess whether they are harming the country’s media industry.
According to BBC News, “traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals and suffered a sharp drop in advertising revenues”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The government in Canberra has “rising concerns about the future of the media sector following years of falling profits, newsroom job cuts and the rise of fake news”, the website adds.
Rod Sims, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chief, said the governing body “will study how digital platforms such as Facebook and Google operate to fully understand their influence in Australia”.
The agency will examine “the effect of technological change on competition in media and advertising”, he explained.
However, Peter Cox, an independent media analyst, told Reuters that it was unclear what measures the competition regulator might suggest taking if it does find that the country’s media industry is “increasingly anti-competitive”.
The investigation could be “a stepping stone towards another type of reform, such as tax”, Cox said.
The ACCC’s preliminary report is due at the beginning of December next year, says Engadget, while the final report won’t be released until June 2019 at the earliest.
-
Political cartoons for October 18Cartoons Saturday's editorial cartoons include conversion therapy, Russ Vought, and more
-
President Trump: ‘waging war’ on ChicagoTalking Point Federal agents are carrying out ‘increasingly aggressive’ immigration raids – but have sanctuary cities like Chicago brought it on themselves?
-
Crossword: October 18, 2025The Week's daily crossword puzzle
-
Is the UK government getting too close to Big Tech?Today’s Big Question US-UK tech pact, supported by Nvidia and OpenAI, is part of Silicon Valley drive to ‘lock in’ American AI with US allies
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
South Korea's divide over allowing Google MapsTalking Points The country is one of few modern democracies where the app doesn't work
-
Google avoids the worst in antitrust rulingSpeed Read A federal judge rejected the government's request to break up Google
-
Is AI killing the internet?Talking Point AI-powered browsers and search engines are threatening the death of the open web
-
Unreal: A quantum leap in AI videoFeature Google's new Veo 3 is making it harder to distinguish between real videos and AI-generated ones
-
Google's new AI Mode feature hints at the next era of searchIn the Spotlight The search giant is going all in on AI, much to the chagrin of the rest of the web
-
Is Apple breaking up with Google?Today's Big Question Google is the default search engine in the Safari browser. The emergence of artificial intelligence could change that.
