Welcome back to Mlex's podcast covering regulatory affairs around the world.

It's great to have your company.

And for our listeners in the Northern Hemisphere, who may be on their summer break,

we hope you're able to unwind after the events of the past six months.

My name is James Panicki. I'm from Emlex's Asia-Pacific team.

And this week, we thought we'd recap recent developments in the global clash

between digital platforms, in particular Facebook and Google, and ailing media publishers.

The broad strokes of this clash will be familiar to you already.

Media companies are hemorrhaging advertising dollars to the platforms

and want to be compensated for the content they provide.

The platforms argue that they aren't themselves media publishers,

but simply intermediaries connecting

readers with media content, and as such, shouldn't have to pay the publishers at all.

The backdrop of this debate is, of course, that legacy media is in crisis. A business model

based on advertising revenue is collapsing, and the publishers are demanding regulatory intervention.

The question now is not so much whether the relationship between publishers and platforms

will be regulated, but what form that regulation will take.

In European jurisdictions, we've seen regulators build a case around copyright laws

and will cross to Brussels to tease that out in just a moment.

But in other parts of the world, the issue has been seen through the lens of competition law.

And Australia appears to be the frontrunner of this approach with the competition regulator,

the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, last week

...