Australia is getting serious about making Big Tech pay for news. The country’s government unveiled draft legislation on Tuesday that would require companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok to pay for the journalism they aggregate or reshare, or face a levy on their local revenues.

Communications minister Anika Wells said at a press conference today: “People are increasingly getting their news directly from Facebook, from TikTok, and from Google.”

The proposed law, called the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), would impose a 2.25% levy on the Australian revenues of the three platforms unless they strike commercial deals with local news publishers. Plus, the more deals they make with media outlets, the less they pay. If enough agreements go through, that effective rate drops to 1.5%, which could generate between A$200 million and A$250 million back into Australian journalism.

“Journalists are the lifeblood of Australia’s media sector, playing a vital role in keeping communities informed about the news that matters to them,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement.

It is the country’s second attempt to force Big Tech to fund journalism. The Australian government introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, which officially came into effect in 2021, requiring platforms like Google and Meta to pay news publishers. But the original version had a flaw that Big Tech companies could simply remove news from their platforms to avoid paying. Meta did that in 2024, and that move, reportedly, triggered widespread job cuts across Australian newsrooms.

Meta’s decision to pull news content in 2024 left a pretty obvious gap in Australia’s media rules. The NBI is the government’s attempt to fix it, and this time, there’s no workaround. Platforms get taxed whether they carry news or not. The Albanese government first announced the NBI in December 2024 as a replacement for the existing 2021 Code, and the draft legislation finally landed today.

TikTok’s inclusion marks a notable expansion from the Code. And the draft legislation explicitly excludes AI services. Assistant treasurer Daniel Mulino said at today’s press conference that AI “is not included in the scope of this measure” because “AI is currently being examined through a range of other policy forums, including, for example, the work on copyright being led by the Attorney-General.”

The Trump administration has consistently opposed digital services taxes on U.S. tech companies, repeatedly threatening tariffs against countries that push ahead with them. Most recently, Trump has warned the U.K. that it could face steep tariffs unless London drops its digital services tax on U.S. tech giants that derive value from British users, including Google, Meta, and Apple.

When a journalist asked about the pushback from the White House, Albanese said at the press conference, “We’re a sovereign nation, and my Government will make decisions based upon the Australian national interest. We do that right across the board.”

If passed in Australia, platforms have until July to comply, the same date the levy kicks in.

Australia isn’t alone in this fight. Canada, Brazil, and the EU have all taken on Big Tech over news, with mixed results. Canada’s 2023 law prompted Meta to pull news from its platform entirely. Brazil’s bill has been stuck in legislative limbo since 2019. The EU has rules on the books, but enforcement varies widely. South Africa may offer the clearest blueprint — regulators there brokered direct deals with Google, Meta, TikTok, and Microsoft, securing roughly $40 million for local news outlets over five years.

Meta, Google, and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a landmark legal case that could redefine digital privacy rights for people across the United States.

The case, Chatrie v. United States, centers on the government’s controversial use of so-called “geofence” search warrants. Law enforcement and federal agents use these warrants to compel tech companies, like Google, to turn over information about which of its billions of users were in a certain place and time based on their phone’s location.

By casting a wide net over a tech company’s stores of users’ location data, investigators can reverse-engineer who was at the scene of a crime, effectively allowing police to identify criminal suspects akin to finding a needle in a digital haystack.

But civil liberties advocates have long argued that geofence warrants are inherently overbroad and unconstitutional as they return information about people who are nearby yet have no connection to an alleged incident. In several cases over recent years, geofence warrants have ensnared innocent people who were coincidentally nearby and whose personal information was demanded anyway, been incorrectly filed to collect data far outside of their intended scope, and used to identify individuals who attended protests or other legal assembly.

The use of geofence warrants has seen a surge in popularity among law enforcement circles over the last decade, with a New York Times investigation finding the practice first used by federal agents in 2016. Each year since 2018, federal agencies and police departments around the U.S. have filed thousands of geofence warrants, representing a significant proportion of legal demands received by tech companies like Google, which store vast banks of location data collected from user searches, maps, and Android devices.

Chatrie is the first major Fourth Amendment case that the U.S. top court has considered this decade. The decision could decide whether geofence warrants are legal. Much of the case rests on whether people in the U.S. have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy over information collected by tech giants, like location data.

It’s not yet clear how the nine justices of the Supreme Court will vote — a decision is expected later this year — or whether the court would outright order the stop to the controversial practice. But arguments heard before the court on Monday give some insight into how the justices might rule on the case. 

“Search first and develop suspicions later“

The case focuses on Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man convicted of a 2019 bank robbery. Police at the time saw a suspect on the bank’s security footage speaking on a cellphone. Investigators then served a “geofence” search warrant to Google, demanding that the company provide information about all of the phones that were located within a short radius of the bank and within an hour of the robbery. 

In practice, law enforcement are able to draw a shape on a map around a crime scene or another place of significance, and demand to sift through large amounts of location data from Google’s databases to pinpoint anyone who was there at a given point in time.

In response to the geofence warrant, Google provided reams of anonymized location data belonging to its account holders who were located in the area at the time of the robbery, then investigators asked for more information about some of the accounts who were near the bank for several hours prior to the job. 

Police then received the names and associated information of three account holders — one of which they identified as Chatrie.

Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty and received a sentence of more than 11 years in prison. But as his case progressed through the courts, his legal team argued that the evidence obtained through the geofence warrant, which allegedly linked him to the crime scene, shouldn’t have been used.

A key point in Chatrie’s case invokes an argument that privacy advocates have often used to justify the unconstitutionality of geofence warrants.

The geofence warrant “allowed the government to search first and develop suspicions later,” they argue, adding that it goes against the long-standing principles of the Fourth Amendment that puts guardrails in place to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, including of people’s data.

As the Supreme Court-watching site SCOTUSblog points out, one of the lower courts agreed that the geofence warrant had not established the prerequisite “probable cause” linking Chatrie to the bank robbery justifying the geofence warrant to begin with. 

The argument posed that the warrant was too general by not describing the specific account that contained the data investigators were after.

But the court allowed the evidence to be used in the case against Chatrie anyway because it determined law enforcement acted in good faith in obtaining the warrant.

According to a blog post by civil liberties attorney Jennifer Stisa Granick, an amicus brief filed by a coalition of security researchers and technologists presented the court with the “most interesting and important” argument to help guide its eventual decision. The brief argues that this geofence warrant in Chatrie’s case was unconstitutional because it ordered Google to actively rifle through the data stored in the individual accounts of hundreds of millions of Google users for the information that police were looking for, a practice incompatible with the Fourth Amendment.

The government, however, has largely contended that Chatrie “affirmatively opted to allow Google to collect, store, and use” his location data and that the warrant “simply directed Google to locate and turn over the necessary information.” The U.S. solicitor general, D. John Sauer, arguing for the government prior to Monday’s hearing, said that Chatrie’s “arguments seem to imply that no geofence warrant, of any sort, could ever be executed.”

Following a split-court on appeal. Chatrie’s lawyers asked the U.S. top court to take up the case to decide whether geofence warrants are constitutional.

Justices appear mixed after hearing arguments

While the case is unlikely to affect Chatrie’s sentence, the Supreme Court’s ruling could have broader implications for Americans’ privacy.

Following livestreamed oral arguments between Chatrie’s lawyers and the U.S. government in Washington on Monday, the court’s nine justices appeared largely split on whether to outright ban the use of geofence warrants, though the justices may find a way to narrow how the warrants are used.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose expertise includes Fourth Amendment law, said in a lengthy social media post that the court was “likely to reject” Chatrie’s arguments about the lawfulness of the warrant, and would likely allow law enforcement to continue using geofence warrants, so long as they are limited in scope.

Cathy Gellis, a lawyer who writes at Techdirt, said in a post that it appeared the court “likes geofence warrants but there may be hesitance to fully get rid of them.” Gellis’ analysis anticipated “baby steps, not big rules” in the court’s final decision.

Although the case focuses much on a search of Google’s location databases, the implications reach far beyond Google but for any company that collects and stores location data. Google eventually moved to store its users’ location data on their devices rather than on its servers where law enforcement could request it. The company stopped responding to geofence warrant requests last year as a result, according to The New York Times.

The same can’t be said for other tech companies that store their customers’ location data on their servers, and within arm’s reach of law enforcement. Microsoft, Yahoo, Uber, Snap, and others have been served geofence warrants in the past.

Last year, WhatsApp and Apple notified several people in Italy, including journalists and activists, that they had been targeted with government spyware. In particular, WhatsApp pointed the finger at the Israeli American surveillance tech maker Paragon Solutions as the company that provided the technology for a hacking campaign that targeted around 90 people around the world with its “Graphite” spyware.

The notifications prompted a scandal in Italy that is still unfolding. After being notified of the attacks, a number of victims filed criminal complaints with Italian authorities, and prosecutors then opened an investigation. 

Now it appears that Paragon, despite its previous promises to help Italian authorities investigate the scandal, is said to be uncollaborative.

According to Wired Italy, Italian prosecutors sent a formal request for information to Paragon, via the Israeli government, but a year after the investigations were opened, the company has yet to respond.

Following the eruption of the spyware scandal in Italy, Paragon publicly called out the Italian government, claiming it refused the company’s offer to investigate whether a journalist was hacked and spied on with its Graphite spyware. The company went so far as to cancel its contract with Italy’s two spy agencies, AISE and AISI, in part because the Italian government turned down the company’s offer to help.

It’s unclear why Paragon has not responded to the prosecutor’s request. It’s possible that the Israeli government intervened. In 2024, The Guardian reported that the Israeli government seized documents from NSO’s office to prevent the company from complying with demands in the lawsuit against WhatsApp.

Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack told Wired Italy that the Israeli government could force local companies to cooperate with foreign judicial requests for information, “but this has never happened.”

Spain’s High Court closed its investigation earlier this year into the use of NSO’s spyware to target Spanish politicians, claiming Israeli authorities did not cooperate with its probe.  

Paragon, the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., and the prosecutors’ offices in Rome and Naples, which are jointly investigating the case, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. 

In the history of government spyware, it’s extremely rare for a company to get into a public fight with one of its former customers. Paragon’s move was likely motivated by its longstanding attempts to appear as an ostensibly more righteous alternative to other spyware makers, such as NSO Group or Intellexa, which have been ensnared in countless scandals around the world.

Instead, Paragon’s official website, which no longer loads, said the company provides customers “with ethically based tools, teams, and insights.”

So far, this is Paragon’s first public scandal, but the company now has an active contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which for a year has been arresting and deporting tens of thousands of immigrants all over the country. ICE told lawmakers that its law-enforcement arm Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is using Paragon’s spyware to counter terrorism and drug trafficking.    

Italy’s government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has always denied hacking two of the journalists, Francesco Cancellato and Ciro Pellegrino, who work at the online news website Fanpage and whose phones were targeted by Paragon’s Graphite. The Citizen Lab, a research organization that has investigated spyware abuses for more than a decade, confirmed both journalists were hacked with Graphite.

The other victims in the country include activists who work for Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian nonprofit with the mission of rescuing migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Last June, the Italian parliamentary committee that oversees the country’s spy agencies investigated the scandal, and concluded that the targeting of the activists was lawful. But it also said it could not find evidence that Cancellato was targeted, and the committee did not investigate Pellegrino’s case at all. 

Then, in March, the same prosecutors who have requested information from Paragon said in a press release that a forensic investigation into Cancellato’s device confirmed that his phone had indeed been hacked, while it could not conclude the same after analyzing Pellegrino’s phone.

The prosecutors’ investigation is still ongoing.