Is Google planning to pull out of the Australian market? It’s not as unlikely as it may seem.
If, as Google asserted today, the federal government’s news media bargaining code is “unworkable”, will the search giant do the unthinkable and pull its search engine from the Australian market? Or will a global deal between News Corp and Google kill Australia’s brief foray into tech regulation?
As those two corporate elephants, Google and News Corp, dance in New York towards a global content deal, today’s push-back by Google against Australia’s proposed bargaining code suggests that it could be the local media companies that end up trampled.
In a blog post today by Google’s Australia and New Zealand managing director Mel Silva, Google warns that the current draft “affects the free services and tools we provide to 20 million Australians and more than a million Australian businesses”. Facebook has already announced that it will block Australians from posting news if the code is adopted.
