Google threatened Friday to shut down its search engine in Australia if officials there pass legislation requiring news publishers to be paid for their content.
The Silicon Valley titan escalated its aggressive battle against the proposal and said the move would « break the way Google works » as the company would have to pay to display links to news articles.
« This code poses an unreasonable and unmanageable financial and operational risk to our company, » said Mel Silva, executive director of Google Australia, in an open letter, reiterating the comments she had made before an Australian Senate committee.
« If the Code were to become law in its current form, we would have no choice but to stop serving Google Search in Australia. »
The controversial proposal would allow news companies to receive payments from Google and negotiate Facebook for the use of their content that appears in search results or news feeds. An arbitrator would set the price if the parties couldn’t reach an agreement.
Google previously announced that the move would « jeopardize » its free services – including search engine and YouTube – in Australia if made law. Google is now saying the proposal will not affect YouTube as it stands.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded to Google’s threat to block access to Search, saying the country was making rules for « things. » that you can do in Australia « .
» People who want to work with it in Australia are very welcome. However, we do not respond to threats, « said Morrison.
Google’s offensive came after the US sales representatives Daniel Bahar and Karl Ehlers had asked Australia to drop the proposed bill.
The proposal has widespread political support Down Under and is supported by publishers such as News Corp., which The Post owns and the eight of publishes ten largest Australian newspapers.
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