Sydney (AFP)

Discussions at the highest level took place Friday between Canberra and Facebook in the aftermath of the social network's blocking of news content for Australian Internet users, sparking a wave of outrage.

Australia has said it does not want to give up its bill which aims to force the tech giants to pay the media for the recovery of their content.

On Thursday, to show its opposition to this text, Facebook made it impossible for Australians to publish links to news articles and the country's media pages could no longer be consulted from the social network.

Australian Finance Minister Josh Frydenberg said he spoke with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg on Friday with the aim of finding a way out of this showdown.

He said discussions would continue throughout the weekend.

“We have discussed the outstanding issues and have agreed that our respective teams will address them immediately,” Frydenberg said on Twitter.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged Facebook to end what he called "threats" and "return to the negotiating table".

He recalled that this bill is closely scrutinized by many leaders across the planet, indicating that he spoke about it during telephone interviews with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Justin Trudeau.

Washington, a close ally of Canberra, has refused to take a public stand on the issue.

"This is a business negotiation between several private companies and the Australian government," Ned Price, spokesperson for the US State Department, commented on Friday.

"We regularly provide support to American companies, but generally we do not disclose the details of this support," he added.

Australia's bill - a "binding code of conduct" that targets Facebook's "news feed" and Google searches - was approved this week by the House of Representatives.

It will be debated from Monday by the Senate and should be adopted by the end of next week.

Facebook, for its part, seems to be sticking to its positions, believing that this project "completely ignores" the relations between the platform and the media.

The social network said it had no choice but to put in place such restrictions.

Since their entry into force on Thursday, the number of people viewing Australian media sites has fallen at home and abroad, with overseas traffic falling by more than 20% per day, according to the company. Chartbeat data analysis.

However, Internet users do not seem to have left Facebook for Google, which does not seem to have recorded an increase in its traffic.

The executive chairman of News Corp.

Australia's Michael Miller told the Senate in an investigation unrelated to the bill that news groups had yet to measure the full effect of Facebook's move.

Yesterday, SEO traffic from the platform disappeared, he explained, while "direct traffic to our websites recorded double-digit growth."

Miller also encouraged Facebook to negotiate directly with the media.

“The door is always open for Facebook,” he said.

The blockage has sparked anger in Canberra, especially as several official rescue service Facebook pages have been affected.

Most of them were working normally again a few hours later.

Google also threatened to suspend its search engine in Australia before backing down Wednesday by agreeing to pay "significant sums" in return for content from the news group News Corp.

by Rupert Murdoch.

© 2021 AFP