Google is threatening to withdraw its search engine from an entire country – Australia – if a proposed law comes into force that would force Google to pay news publishers for its content.
“If this version of the Code were to become law, we would have no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Meg Silva, vice president of Google in Australia and New Zealand, told the Economic Legislation Committee of the Australian Senate today.
“We had to conclude after examining the legislation in detail that we do not see a way, with the financial and operational risks, to continue to offer a 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 worthwhile to show news links and excerpts on Google Search, not just for news articles in places like Google News, saying that “Would set an unsustainable precedent for our business and the digital economy” and that “is not compatible with the way 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 business: “Google will not be required to charge Australians for using its free services, such as Search Google and YouTube, unless you decide to do so. ”Clearly, Google disagrees.
As Google explains in Silva’s full testimony and in a blog post that accompanies him, he prefers to pay publishers specifically for his Google News products. (He has already announced a program to pay publishers in Australia, Germany and Brazil in June.)
Australia does not seem to think that this is enough. The ACCC believes that the proposed law addresses “a significant imbalance in bargaining power between Australian news media companies and Google and Facebook”. As my colleague Jon Porter said in August:
Australia’s News Media Trading Code bill proposal, which is currently in draft form and targeting Facebook alongside Google, follows a 2019 investigation in Australia that found the tech giant is taking a disproportionately large share large portion of online advertising revenue, although much of its content comes from media organizations. Since then, the news and media industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. The Guardian reports that more than a hundred local newspapers in Australia have had to fire journalists and close or stop printing, as advertising revenue has fallen.
Facebook is also in the sights of the ACCC with this particular law, and is threatening to block its news from being shared in Australia as well. Both companies are calling these blockages the “worst case” scenario, and Google insisted it was not a threat, but it certainly sounds like one.