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Taken at face value the introduction in 2021 of Australia's News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code ("the Code") may appear "world leading," innovative, and, in general, a productive and strategic intervention to reverse the decline of public interest journalism. It is claimed that in the Australian news industry context, an annual transfer of around $200 million between two platform companies – Google and Meta – and news businesses has now been put in place (Sims, 2022). All major news media companies in Australia, if not smaller more independent ones, have greatly benefitted from the new Code, and anecdotally it appears that the funding has resulted in the creation of significant numbers of new journalists being hired. Yet the exact investment destination and ultimate beneficiaries of the funding are not known beyond the corporate walls of the recipients. The article points to the transparency and sustainability problems inherent to the new Code, arguing that an alternative approach to funding public interest journalism might be a levy funded by the platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of platform governance, this paper examines the market, politics, and governance of made-in-China digital platforms in Australia, with a focus on WeChat and TikTok. It investigates how formal and informal arrangements are intertwined in the governance regimes and market strategies of these Chinese digital platforms when trying to navigate the turbulent waters of intensified Sino-Australia relations and a global trend towards increased government intervention in platform governance. The two made-in-China platforms represent two different models in platform governance adopted by Tencent and ByteDance: one conditioned by the Chinese 'strict liability' model and the other leaning toward the Western 'broad immunity' model. The Australian case illustrates the strife, success and politics of outbound Chinese digital platforms in a Western liberal democracy. It also highlights the dilemma, conundrum, and possible breakthrough in platform governance on a splintered and yet increasingly interconnected social media space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our 'Backend-in method' proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of platform use. The 'Traceback method' uses researcher-informant collaboration to document and reflect on the shifts of platform affordances that have reconfigured media practices, organisational structures, and economic incentives over time. We show how these methods proved useful in mapping Chinese-Australian media organisations' deployment of WOAs for news production. Together these methods contribute ways to understand previously hidden aspects of media practice and platform governance in a novel methodological design, which may have wider application for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian 'news ban' exposed the limits of a regulatory model that has previously left the tech industry to moderate itself. In this paper, we argue the introduction of the Code is a leading example of a global trajectory towards regulatory change, which sees governments move from a reactive regulation model to specific interventions around the governance of digital media spaces. We discuss how best to measure the successes and failures around this more interventionist model through a case study of the implementation of the Code in Australia. More broadly we consider how global platforms have responded, and whether the reform is an effective regulatory model for other national governments to emulate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we undertake a stakeholder analysis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platforms Inquiry to understand the nature and influence of different forms of public input. Our findings show that nation-state regulation of digital platforms is now very much on the policy agenda worldwide, with a focus upon the competition policy dimensions of platform regulation. The second key finding is that the regulatory activism of the ACCC have ensured that the Inquiry and its findings have had maximum public impact. Finally, we argue that the key dynamic shaping the Inquiry was the competing demands of the traditional news media publishers and digital platforms, and that civil society input was relatively limited and secondary to the final recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]