Sam Koslowski

No, they're universally disappointed, I'd say.

They are.

I mean, this has been a long process for everybody involved.

They've been saying the same thing for many years, which is essentially that this is like a really blunt decision

tax that discourages tech companies from being involved in the Australian economy.

It doesn't benefit news companies in the way that the government hopes it would because news companies don't have to be transparent about where they're spending the money.

There's all of those kind of arguments.

And so, I mean, Meta has been the most blunt in its assessment, basically saying they could be exploring potential legal challenges to it.

And there's kind of this consensus that this is the worst case scenario for them.

On the media side of things, there's some very happy people in media companies because this almost opens up entirely new revenue streams.

Yeah.

There's also some concern from parts of the media, you know, what classifies something as a media company is a really interesting discussion.

Very.

How we ensure that independent media companies get these deals, not just the big players in town.

It's very... Our emotions and our strategy in how we are approaching this is complicated because on one hand, we don't fundamentally think that media companies should get money from tech companies.

Because part of...

innovation is evolving with the times and the example that we've used before is you mean revenue models wise yeah the example that we've used before is you know there's physical retail and then ebay comes along and gumtree comes along and revolutionizes the way that we shop the iconic comes along you don't see physical retail brands saying we demand to do a deal with ebay to make sure that things are fair again you see physical retail expanding their online presence yeah

and making products online that are more authentic to new ways that people shop.

So that's kind of one side of things.

And that's kind of the other side of the coin, right, is that the news media industry needs help.