Google threatens to shut down the machine searchs from an entire continent (*) – Australia – if a proposed law goes into effect that would force the company to pay news publishers for their content.
"If it becomes law, it wouldn't give us any real option than to stop making Google Search available in Australia," Google Australia and New Zealand spokesperson Meg Silva told the Australian Senate's Economic Legislation Committee today.
"We had to decide after scrutinizing the legislation and not finding a way, with the financial and operational risks, to continue to offer the service in Australia," he added, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The company, which has been pushing against the Australian bill for months, claims the country is trying to make it pay to display links and snippets in Google Search News, and not just Google News.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which drafted the law, appeared to suggest in August that this should not affect Google's search business:
“Η Google δεν θα υποχρεωθεί να χρεώσει τους Αυστραλούς για τη χρήση των δωρεάν υπηρεσιών της, όπως η Αναζήτηση της Google και το YouTube, except if he chooses.”
But it is clear that Google disagrees.
As Google explains with Silva's statement and in a post on her blog, would prefer to pay publishers for their products on Google News. (It already announced a publisher payment schedule in Australia, Germany and Brazil in June.)
However, Australia does not believe that is enough. The ACCC believes the proposed law addresses "a significant imbalance of bargaining power between the Australian news companies Google and Facebook".
Australia's proposed media law, which currently targets Facebook and Google, follows a 2019 survey in Australia that found that the Companies λαμβάνουν ένα δυσανάλογα μεγάλο μερίδιο εσόδων από τις διαφημίσεις στο διαnetwork, even though much of their content comes from news companies. Since then, the news and media industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. The Guardian he says that more than a hundred local newspapers in Australia had to lay off journalists or shut down or stop printing as advertising revenue fell.
* Correction after a comment on Facebook.
