Google Threatens to Shut Search Engine in Australia, PM Morrison Hits Back

Notably, Google had warned to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content.

Updated: January 22, 2021 2:21 PM IST

By India.com News Desk | Edited by Surabhi Shaurya

Google, Facebook, Case Against Google

New Delhi: ‘We don’t respond to threats’, said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, hitting back at Google for threatening to disable its search engine in the country.  Notably, Google had warned to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content.

“Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia. That’s done in our parliament. It’s done by our government. And that’s how things work here in Australia”, Morrison told reporters in Brisbane.

His reaction comes after Mel Silva, the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand asserted that if this version of the code were to become law, it would give them no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia”, news agency AP quoted Silva as saying.

Silva said it was willing to pay a wide and diverse group of news publishers for the value they added, but not under the rules as proposed, which included payments for links and snippets.

She said the code’s biased arbitration model also posed unmanageable financial and operational risks for Google. She suggested a series of tweaks to the bill. We feel there is a workable path forward, Silva added

Besides, social media giant Facebook has also threatened to remove news stories from its site in Australia. Simon Milner, a Facebook vice president, said the sheer volume of deals it would have to strike would be unworkable.

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