Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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Support for this show is brought to you by Vanta.
Managing the requirements for modern security programs is increasingly challenging. Vanta gives you one place to centralize and scale your security program, quickly assess risk, streamline security reviews, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and more. Decoder listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Just go to vanta.com/decoder to claim your discount. That's vanta.com/decoder.

**Nilay Patel** (1:08)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. And this episode is about problems.
So a couple of weeks ago, Facebook briefly turned off the ability for anyone in the world to post links from Australian news publishers. They just blocked them with a little message. It's a real thing that happened. The company, along with Google, was locked into a fight with the Australian government over something called the media bargaining code, which requires social platforms and search engines to pay news publishers for linking to their work, just linking to it. This is a big deal. It changes the way the web works.
Both Google and Facebook threatened to leave Australia over the media bargaining code.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:56)
While we start in Australia, where Google has threatened to switch off its search engine, should a new law come into force that would make it pay for showing local news articles on its site?

**Nilay Patel** (2:07)
Tensions escalated until Google basically just cut a deal with Australia's biggest news organizations, paid them the money, and Facebook responded by turning off their access to the news feed entirely.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:18)
Facebook has blocked users in Australia from seeing and sharing news. This follows a fight.

**Nilay Patel** (2:24)
After a few days, the law was slightly modified. Facebook also paid the money and access was restored. And the media bargaining code is now the law in Australia. In the meantime, there was a lot of debate about whether this was the appropriate way to regulate big tech companies, whether the bargaining code made any sense, and if the whole internet was just gonna fracture into smaller and smaller national internets. One internet for Australia, one for the United States, one for every other country in the world.
What struck me about all this as we went through it is that we heard a lot from Google and from Facebook. We heard a lot from Australian government officials, but we hadn't really heard from anyone in the Australian tech industry. So I called up Scott Farquhar, the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, Australia's biggest tech company and one of Australia's biggest companies, period. Atlassian is a big deal. The company is around 20 years old and it makes Jira, which software development teams around the world all use to manage their projects. It also makes Trello, which is a super popular project management tool that you can use for all kinds of things. Notably, Atlassian has always been a global company, even when it was just Scott and his co-founder Mike Cannon Brooks. Their first sales were outside of Australia. That's the power of the internet.
Scott and I talked about why Australia is the test bed for tech regulation around the world due to its size, location and how its government is structured. We talked about what happened with the media bargaining code and how it will work in Australia now that it's passed. And we talked a lot about how to run a global company in an increasingly fractured world and whether new regulations help level the playing field and increase competition or just cement the incumbents.
This conversation is mostly about policy and I want to call it one of Scott's comments in particular. He said that having a great public policy team and being engaged with regulators is now a key business advantage. That is not how tech companies were thinking about anything even five years ago. Keep that in mind as you listen to this conversation and as you hear about efforts to regulate tech around the world. It's just part of the business now.
OK, Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:43)
Here we go.

**Nilay Patel** (4:56)
Scott Farquhar, you're the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian. Welcome to Decoder.

**Scott Farquhar** (5:01)
Thanks for having me.

**Nilay Patel** (5:02)
What time is it there for you?