A$200 million flowed to Australian publishers after the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code pushed Google and Facebook into commercial content deals, former minister Paul Fletcher said.
Fletcher said the code worked because Australia treated platform dominance as a competition-policy problem, built a lengthy evidence base and attached enforceable consequences if negotiations failed.
Generative AI is now reviving the same underlying dispute in a new form, he said, as systems use publisher-funded journalism without necessarily sending traffic back and may test copyright boundaries.
For publishers, Fletcher argued the lesson is twofold: governments can still force global platforms to comply, but media companies also need clearer content differentiation in an AI-saturated market.