Sam Koslowski

Mm-hmm.

NMBI has been released in the draft form by the government.

And they've asked for media to have a look at it and social media companies to have a look at it before they table it in parliament.

Exactly.

But if you take this all the way back,

This really is about a concern from news media companies that the revenue... And the government.

And the government, that the revenue that they used to get, mainly through advertising, has been replaced by those advertisers now using social media companies.

So let's say that you run a carpet shop.

You might have taken out an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald or the Daily Telegraph.

Maybe now you'd put that ad on Instagram or Facebook.

And so we've seen social media companies' revenues go up a lot since they came onto the scene in 2007-ish.

And we've seen news companies' revenues decrease dramatically.

And one of the arguments made by the news organizations is the social media companies benefit from news companies posting on there.

And so the solution in the eyes of the large media companies is that social media companies should pay news companies as a kind of an indirect profit share to keep news healthy, which is a public good in many ways and we need it in society, and also recognise that the landscape has shifted.

So that's kind of the core premise of where this all comes from.

Exactly.

Cool.

That's kind of the starting point.

Well, the big problem that's taken everybody now almost over a decade to try and solve is how.

How do you actually go about implementing a scheme like that?