Facebook holding company Meta no longer wants to pay license fees for news. News is practically freely available on the Internet because Facebook and Google ensure mass distribution.
Meta claims that links to news only make up a fraction of users' feeds and that publishers can still publish news content on their own pages on Facebook. The company's contracts with Australian media outlets usually ran for three years and were due to expire in 2024. The country's government must now decide whether to appoint its own intermediary to set Meta's fees as part of a new round of agreements.