Meta and TikTok Join Google Against Indonesia's AI Copyright Bill

Meta and TikTok have joined Google in opposing Indonesia's planned copyright overhaul, a draft law that would make digital platforms pay publishers for news content and create the country's first rules on artificial intelligence. Representatives of the three companies made their arguments at a parliamentary hearing in Jakarta on November 11, Reuters reported.

The bill carries real commercial risk for the platforms. Companies that fail to comply could face sanctions up to the revocation of their local business permits — a penalty that would end operations in a market of more than 270 million people.

What did the platforms tell lawmakers?

Each company sent a senior policy figure to the hearing, and each attacked a different part of the draft.

• Google: Agung Pamungkas, government affairs manager for Google Indonesia, told lawmakers that requiring platforms to pay for showing news links would end up restricting Indonesians' access to news.
• Meta: Berni Moestafa, Meta's public policy head in Indonesia, said "publishers could lose readership traffic as well as potential advertising and subscription revenue." He argued that linking to an article is different from republishing it.
• TikTok: Noudhy Valdryno, TikTok's Indonesia policy chief, focused on the AI clauses. He said disclosure rules should not cover content where AI only assists creation, and urged lawmakers to keep safe-harbour protections, because platforms cannot reliably verify who owns a copyright or holds a licence.

The common thread is liability. All three companies want to keep the line between referencing content and reproducing it, and none wants to become the enforcement layer for ownership disputes. The hearing shows where the draft's payment and AI clauses will meet the strongest resistance.

What would the draft bill actually do?

The bill is a parliamentary initiative, first reported by Reuters in July. Its payment mechanism works through the state: platforms would pay compensation for aggregating, republishing or link-previewing news content, and for using that content to train AI. The money would flow to state-supervised collective management organisations, which would then pass it on to publishers.

The AI provisions go further than the news payments. The draft would:

• Ban the use of AI to imitate a creator's "distinctive style"
• Require disclosure of AI use in content
• Protect AI-assisted works only if they meet human-involvement criteria
• Deny copyright entirely to fully AI-generated works
• Place AI training on copyrighted works under fair-use provisions or licensing agreements

That framework would give Indonesia one of the more aggressive AI copyright regimes in Asia, and would write platform payment obligations directly into copyright law rather than leaving them to regulation.

Why the government says it must act

Indonesian officials frame the bill as a response to generative AI, not merely a revenue grab. "The development of generative AI has disrupted the copyright framework," Hermansyah Siregar, a law ministry official overseeing intellectual property, said in July. "If unregulated, it could kill human creation."

Google has pushed back on the drafting approach. The company said at the time that "rigid, overbroad mandates" would harm local creators, slow innovation and leave Indonesia an international outlier.

Is this fight happening elsewhere?

The platforms' arguments are not new, and their track record matters for Indonesia. Google, Meta and TikTok used similar reasoning against Australia's news bargaining code and Canada's Online News Act. In Canada, Meta went further than lobbying: it blocked news content on its platforms rather than pay publishers.

Indonesia has already tested one route to the same outcome. A 2024 presidential regulation pushed platforms toward deals with publishers, and the bill would now anchor that approach in copyright law, giving it statutory force and a harder enforcement edge — including the permit revocation threat.

The timing of a final vote remains open. Reuters reports it is not clear when the bill could pass, but the Jakarta hearing signals that the three largest platforms intend to fight the payment clauses and the AI rules together, and the outcome will shape how other emerging markets write AI copyright law.