Australia will introduce landmark legislation to force Alphabet’s Google and Facebook to pay publishers and broadcasters for content next week, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said on Friday.
If the law is passed, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Google Australia managing director Mel Silva said.
Australia believes that tech giants should pay the news sources some fair amount of revenue for their work as media companies are suffering from a long term decline in advertising revenue by reading the news off the internet.
The news code loaw will apply to Google and Facebook initially. If that is the case, Australian users will be left without Google search engine and probably have to switch to Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo or Yahoo! for local searches.