Microsoft offers to fill Google’s void if rival exits Australia
SYDNEY: Microsoft said on Wednesday it supports Australia’s plans to make the biggest digital platforms pay for news and would help small businesses transfer their advertising to Bing if Google quits the country.
Microsoft has been positioning itself to increase market share for its search engine Bing after a Google executive told a Senate hearing last month that it would likely make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government goes ahead with a draft law that would make tech giants pay for news content.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a statement that he and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella had told Prime Minister Scott Morrison and communications minister Paul Fletcher in an online meeting last week that “Microsoft fully supports” the so-called News Media Bargaining Code.
Morrison this week confirmed he had spoken to Nadella about Bing replacing Google in Australia. “I can tell you, Microsoft’s pretty confident” that Australians would not be worse off, Morrison said on Monday.
Smith said he had assured the government leaders that small businesses who wished to transfer their advertising from Google to Bing could do so simply and without transfer costs. “We believe that the current legislative proposal represents a fundamental step towards a more level playing field and a fairer digital ecosystem for consumers, business and society,” Smith said.
Under Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code, tech giants Google and Facebook would be required to negotiate payments to news organisations for using their content. If agreement cannot be reached on the size of the payments, the issue would go to so-called “final offer” arbitration where each side proposes a compensation amount and the arbiter chooses one or the other.
Australia’s biggest media companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment, have said the payments could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Google and Facebook, backed up by the US government and leading internet architects, have said the scheme would seriously undermine their business models and the very functioning of the internet.
Although Bing is Australia’s second most popular search engine, it has only a 3.6% market share, according to web analytics service Statcounter. Google says it has 95%.