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News Corp's US policy boss visits Canberra as Trump casts doubt over tech levy

Todd Thorpe, the top government affairs executive at Rupert Murdoch's publishing company, was in Canberra last week as concerns mount over Labor's tech levy.

John Buckley
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The news bargaining incentive became the source of renewed doubt over the weekend after Trump fired off a memo ordering the US Trade Representative to revive investigations into digital service taxes levied by foreign governments on US technology firms. Shutterstock.

News Corp flew its most senior global government affairs executive to Australia amid mounting media industry concerns over the future of Labor’s news bargaining incentive under US President Donald Trump's America-first agenda.

The Murdoch-controlled media company’s New York based executive vice-president, Todd Thorpe, was in Canberra last week to hold briefings with his local counterparts, including on the news bargaining incentive, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Thorpe joined News Corp in 2014 and has a decade of experience on Capitol Hill where he worked as a staffer to Republican members of congress. In his briefings, Thorpe expressed the view that the Trump administration’s posture on tariffs and trade is more focused on regulatory efforts targeting Big Tech firms in Europe than it is on Australia’s efforts to force tech firms to strike deals with media companies.

The implication was that Australia’s news bargaining incentive, which has been described as a tech levy, is not currently considered a hard target of Trump’s escalating global trade war by stakeholders in the US. However, the situation is volatile and could be subject to change.