> Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction

I'm not sure you know what a write off is. If Facebook is paying fees for licensing content then that is an expense, which is deducted from overall gross revenue in calculating profit, and businesses are taxed on the profit they make.

That's an incorrect understanding of the accounting.

First of all it's not a tax deduction, it's a business expense which reduces profit.

Second when you have a tax deduction only a portion (around 20%) of the amount actually reduces taxes, the rest is simply a loss for the business.

> As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing

By that logic the tax payer is paying the electric bill and janitorial services.

That's really not how accounting works.

If Facebook is avoiding taxes via legal loopholes but aren't taking any kind of government subsidies, is it really as though tax payers are paying Newscorp? No tax dollars are being spent to cover anything, the money is just never being paid by Facebook to the government because the government created carve-outs that let Facebook to reduce their liability.

Caveat here, I'm neither a fan of Facebook or tax loop holes. In my opinion tax law should be exceedingly simple and easy to calculate. I don't want to defend Facebook here, but saying the public is paying for this feels like a slight of hand.

This is completely backwards non-logic. If Facebook weren't avoiding tax, you could say that making Facebook pay News Corp means we lose out on tax revenue (because they can claim what they pay as an expense). But if they were already not paying tax, then the money they're paying News Corp is coming 100% from their profits and 0% from taxes they would've paid. (And indeed, assuming News Corp doesn't manage to avoid taxes as efficiently as Facebook, the public actually ends up better off, because News Corp does have to pay tax on their profits)

If they’re already paying 0, then paying even more 0 probably isn’t going to change much. Unless this is a refundable credit, where they can actually get that money back the same year regardless if they’ve already gotten to 0.

I don’t really agree with Canadas “link sharing” payment (people have only told me it is the case that links alone cause payment. I have not read the law. I don’t care enough to look). I do agree with Facebook having to pay for scraping and/or summarizing articles when links are posted, however.