By Ahmed Rahma
An American multinational technology company, Google, has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia over a proposed media code that requires the tech giant to pay for news contents.
According to reports, the Managing Director of the firm’s Australian operations, Mel Silva, informed a Senate enquiry that the code was unworkable and the company was unable to calculate the financial risks.
The MD said, “Leaving the Australian market is the only rational choice if this law were to pass”.
Silvia compared paying news outlet for displaying links to their content to recommending coffee shops to a friend and then being billed by the coffee shops for mentioning them.
“When you put a price on linking to certain information, you break the way that search engines work and you no longer have a free and open web,” she said.
The company wants to pay publishers through its Google News Showcase programme rather than for links.
Nearly 200 publication have signed deals with the programme, Google said.
The news media bargaining code started with the Australian government on April 20, 2020, asking the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) to develop a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms, specifically Google and Facebook.
In December 2020, the bill aimed to force tech companies to pay news outlets for their content of face fines of up to 10 million Australian dollars ($7.7 million) was introduced to the parliament.
Google Search Engine is one of the most popular products from Google and the best search engine in the world. It controls almost 70 per cent of the search engine market and it is always evolving and looking to improve the search engine algorithm to provide best results to the end-user.
Although Google appears to be the biggest search engine, as of 2015, YouTube is now more popular than Google (on desktop computers).
