The Google and Facebook logos on the Australian flag.Dado Ruvic / Reuters
Facebook pledged on Wednesday to invest $ 1 billion in the news industry over the next three years.
The announcement comes a day after the social network decided to restore the news pages in Australia after reaching an agreement with the Government on the regulation that they want to carry out that requires the Silicon Valley company to pay the Australian media for the publication of its contents.
The oceanic country's bill unleashed the first major battle between media and technology.
The American company took advantage of this Wednesday to report that it is negotiating with news publishers in Germany and France for an agreement to pay for the content of its news product and that it has already invested 600 million dollars in the news industry since 2018 .
The new amount of investment to which it has committed is the same that Google set last year, when it announced that it would invest 1 billion dollars in publishing groups for three years.
The business model of the tech giants in relation to the media is under scrutiny as the news industry tries to raise its head amid the crisis that plagues it.
The media consider that technology companies take advantage of the work of content creators without offering them any remuneration and, in addition, they monopolize most of the advertising pie.
Google and Facebook defend that thanks to them publishers have multiplied their number of readers.
Mark Zuckerberg's company lifted the unprecedented blockade of the news that appear on the wall of its about 18 million users in Australia on Tuesday.
The blackout of almost a week came to an end after the American businessman managed to obtain concessions from the Government led by Scott Morrison on the Code of Negotiation of News Media and Digital Platforms that is being debated in the Senate, and which aims to make Facebook and Google negotiate a price with publishers for the content that appears on their platforms.
In a blog where Facebook released its version of the conflict, Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs for the social network, argued that blocking news for four days was a "fundamental misunderstanding" between the relationship of the social network and publishers .
Clegg said it was "understandable" that some media outlets saw Facebook as "a potential source of money to make up for their losses", but that it was not fair to be able to demand a "blank check", which, in his words, was what I wanted the Australian bill in its first version.
"Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misrepresents the relationship between publishers and Facebook," Clegg posited in a post titled
The True Story of What Happened to the news on Facebook in Australia
.
"It's like forcing automakers to fund radio stations because people could listen to them in the car and let the stations set the price," he added.
Now, with the changes applied to the bill, the contribution of each medium to the sustainability of the Australian news industry will be taken into account through trade agreements with companies in the sector.