EU publishers and Microsoft are working together for bringing a law similar to Australia’s for news payments from tech platforms

Tech giant Microsoft is now teaming up with European publishers to create a system where big tech platforms like Facebook and Google would pay for news. This, in turn, will greatly benefit the independent publishers, and Australia is leading this battle. Four of Europe’s biggest news industry groups and Microsoft had recently unveiled their plans to work together to find a solution to mandate payments for using news content found online. The group stated that they would take the lead from proposed legislation in Australia to make sure that tech platforms will no longer exploit publishers and pay them a share of revenue generated from the news.

Social media giant Facebook had blocked the people of Australia from sharing and accessing new content on its platform as a response to the proposal placed by the government. This move received severe backlash and has sparked the debate on the power these social media platforms have. Google has taken a route in this issue and has backed out from the initial threat to stop operations in Australia. The search engine expert is now working on cutting payment deals with publishers and news organizations. EU lawmakers showed their disappointment in Facebook because it went against a country’s law. It is the duty of the companies to adapt to the change instead of trying to evade them.