GOOGLE THREATENS TO PULL PLUG IN AUSTRALIA OVER NEWS PROPOSAL

What happened

Google on Friday threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly hit back, saying “we don’t respond to threats.”

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

What it means

The confrontation highlights Australia’s leading role in the global movement to push back against the outsize influence of U.S. tech giants over the news business. The mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government aims to make Google and Facebook pay Australian media companies fairly for using news content the tech giants siphon from news sites.

Google is resisting the

Australian plan because it would have less control over how much it would have to pay. Under the Australian system, if an online platform and a news business can’t agree on a price for news, an arbitration panel would make a binding decision on payment.

How it happened

Mel Silva, the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, told a Senate inquiry into the new rules “would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia.”

Silva said Google 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.

MICK TSIKAS/AAP IMAGE VIA AP Google official Mel Silva (right) appears via a video link during an Australian Senate inquiry Friday.