Meta will throw the toys out of the cot, again |
Meta will throw the toys out of the cot, again
April 28, 2026 — 4:53pm
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Meta has been blocking news in Canada for 2½ years, and the sky hasn’t fallen on Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s the fact Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his parliamentary colleagues should be staring at this week as they release their draft legislation for the News Bargaining Incentive, not the optimistic precedent of 2021, when Google and Facebook scrambled to sign cheques rather than face designation under the original code.
The world has changed in the past five years: Meta has called the bluff once already, and won.
I’ll admit I underestimated this when the Albanese government first floated this incentive scheme back in December 2024. The government said then that it would introduce a tax worth 2.25 per cent of tech firms’ revenue if they did not strike voluntary agreements with media companies to compensate them for news used on their platforms. For Meta, that would mean a levy in the region of $27 million to $34 million.
My assumption – and it was a common one among newsroom colleagues and executives at other tech companies at the time – was that Meta’s Canadian news ban was a temporary protest, the kind of corporate toddler tantrum that would eventually give way to commercial pragmatism.
Wanting something to work is not the same as believing it will, and the evidence from Canada is not encouraging.
Surely, the thinking........