The Era of Free News for Facebook and Google May Soon Be Over

Facebook and Google have for years operated like shop windows for news stories, plying their billions of visitors with free snippets and information from articles across the web. An antitrust tussle that’s coming to a head in Australia is set to change that.

Australia’s competition regulator will this month publish draft rules forcing the two U.S. tech giants to share revenue generated from news with the original publishers, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A final version of the code, the first of its kind in the world, is due to follow soon after.

Between them, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. ...