CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian Prime Minister said on Monday that Microsoft was confident it could fill the void if Google carried out its threat to remove its search engine from Australia.
A Google executive said in a Senate hearing last month that he would likely make his search engine unavailable in Australia if the government pursued plans to make tech giants pay for news content.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he has since spoken to Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella about the Bing search engine taking up space.
“I can tell you, Microsoft is pretty confident” that Australians would not be worse off, Morrison told Australia’s National Press Club.
“These are big tech companies and what is important for Australia, I think, is that we set the right rules for our people,” said Morrison.
“Having a news environment in this country that is sustainable and with commercial support is vital for the functioning of democracies,” he added.
Although Bing is Australia’s second most popular search engine, it occupies only 3.7% of the market share, the Australian newspaper reported. Google says it takes 95%.
Nadella started talking about Zoom with Morrison last week, the newspaper reported.
A Microsoft spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government aims to get Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies fairly for the use of news content that tech giants suck from news sites.
Google has faced pressure from authorities elsewhere to pay for the news. Last month, she signed an agreement with a group of French publishers paving the way for the company to make digital copyright payments. Under the agreement, Google will negotiate individual licensing agreements with newspapers, with payments based on factors such as the published amount of daily and monthly site traffic.
But Google is resisting the Australian plan because it would have less control over how much it would have to pay. Under the Australian system, if an online platform and a news company cannot agree on the price of news, an arbitration panel will make a binding decision on payment.
Morrison said he would like to see “more alignment between the world’s economies” on these antitrust and competition policy issues.