AUSTRALIA PLANS TO TAX DIGITAL PLATFORMS THAT DON'T PAY FOR NEWS

The Australian government said it will tax large digital platforms and search engines unless they agree to share revenue with Australian news media organizations.

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The tax would apply from Jan. 1 to tech companies that earn more than 250 million Australian dollars ($160 million) a year in revenue from Australia, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

They include Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok.

The tax would be offset through money paid to Australian media organizations. The size of the tax is not clear. But the government aims to make sharing revenue with media organizations the cheaper option.

“The real objective ... is not to raise revenue -- we hope not to raise any revenue. The real objective is to incentivize agreement-making between platforms and news media businesses in Australia,” Jones told reporters.

The move comes after Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it would not renew three-year deals to pay Australian news publishers for their content.