Media giant News Corp announced today that it has agreed to a three-year content supply deal with Facebook Inc., putting an end to a disagreement in which the social network giant blocked users from viewing or sharing Australian news.

In February, Australia passed a media law that would force tech companies such as Facebook and Google LLC to pay for the news content they share. Google struck a deal with Australia while Facebook decided to block news content on its platform in Australia, stating that the proposed law “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers.”

The news outage didn’t last for long, since critics were unhappy about government pages, nonprofit organization pages, charity pages and emergency service pages also going dark. Within a week, the Australian government had softened some of the rules, and news content was restored.

What seemed to scare the tech giants the most was a clause in the legislation regarding forced arbitration, which according to Facebook’s global policy chief Nick Clegg would have forced Facebook to “pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multi-national media conglomerates under a system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook.”

After talks, Australia agreed to negate the forced arbitration part of the bill, giving tech companies the ability to negotiate with publishers over payment deals.

Today, News Corp announced that it had struck a deal with the social media giant, although the financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. News Corp said it will involve the news site news.com.au, plus the newspapers The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun and The Courier-Mail. A separate deal was made with the TV network Sky News.

“The agreement with Facebook is a landmark in transforming the terms of trade for journalism, and will have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses,” said News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson. “Mark Zuckerberg and his team deserve credit for their role in helping to fashion a future for journalism, which has been under extreme duress for more than a decade.”

Facebook hasn’t said much about the deal so far. “We’re glad to have this deal in place and look forward to bringing Facebook News to Australia,” said Campbell Brown, its head of global news partnership.

Photo: Edgar Zuniga Jr./Flickr