AUSTRALIA’S Parliament passed the News Media Bargaining Code today, requiring tech giants Google and Facebook to pay for news content.

The law has been welcomed as a landmark levy making the two digital companies pay for the content that attracts many of their users — but critics said last-minute amendments negotiated by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg following the firm’s dramatic shutdown of Australian media pages last week showed corporate players still wielded far too much power.

When Facebook restored access to the pages “headlines said Facebook had backed down — in reality it looks like the government has again watered down the code,” International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) general secretary Anthony Bellanger told the Morning Star.