Australia watchdog suggests news boycott of Google, Facebook

Sydney: Australia’s competition watchdog suggested Tuesday that local media could organise a “collective boycott” of Google and Facebook to force the tech giants to pay for news they put on their platforms.

The radical idea was among a series of possible bargaining tools put forward by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) as it considers a mandatory code of conduct for the tech firms.

Other mechanisms laid out in a 33-page “Concepts Paper” included bilateral negotiations between Australian media organisations and the two tech behemoths and collective bargaining involving all the country’s news companies.