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Google is threatening to remove its search engine from an entire country – Australia – if a bill comes into force that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content.
“If this version of the Code were to become law, it would give us no choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” said Meg Silva, vice president of Google Australia and New Zealand today. Zealand, to the Australian Senate Legislation Committee.
“We had to conclude after reviewing the legislation in detail that we do not see a way, with the financial and operational risks, that we can continue to provide service in Australia,” she added, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
The company, which has been lobbying against Australia’s plan for months, says the country is trying to make it cost effective to show links and snippets to news in Google Search, not just to news articles in places like Google News, claiming that it “sets an untenable precedent for our business and the digital economy” and “incompatible with how search engines work.”
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which drafted the law, appeared to suggest in August that this should not affect Google’s search activity: “Google will not be required to charge Australians for l ‘use his free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless he chooses to do so. ”Obviously, Google disagrees.
As Google explains in Silva’s full statement and in an accompanying blog post, it would rather pay publishers specifically for its Google News products. (It already announced a publisher compensation package in Australia, Germany, and Brazil in June.)
Australia doesn’t seem to think that’s enough, however. The ACCC believes the bill corrects “a significant imbalance in bargaining power between Australian news companies and Google and Facebook.” As my colleague Jon Porter said in August:
Australia’s News Media Trading Code Act, which is currently in draft form and targets Facebook alongside Google, follows a 2019 investigation in Australia that found the tech giant was taking a disproportionate share of online advertising revenue, although much of their content came from media organizations. Since then, the information and media industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. The Guardian reports that more than 100 local newspapers in Australia have had to fire journalists and either shut down or stop printing as advertising revenue has plummeted.
Facebook is also in the ACCC’s sights with this particular law and threatens to block the sharing of its information in Australia as well. Both companies are calling the blockages a “worst-case scenario,” and Google insisted it wasn’t a threat, but it certainly looks like it.
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