- Democratically elected government of a sovereign country decides to regulate its market.
- An foreign entity is trying to blackmail the government to listen to non Australian entity how they should have their market set.
- And point of the writers here is that the Australian government governing its own country and market is wrong and hostile and ... and the Google has right to blackmail it?
Are you serious?
It's not blackmail, Google merely stated that if they are unable to make revenue above the cost of implementing these new laws they will be forced to withdraw from Australia.
You cannot on the left hand say "You must do X (Paying news sites for linking to them)" but also in the right hand say "You cannot do Y (Removing news sites from linking)", that effectively makes this a tax that is passed directly to news company coffers.
They are also not willing to allow third parties to control the content and release timing of updates to their search algorithm, which seems reasonable.
You may not like Google, and I don't either do to it's abuse of small business on its Ads/ AdWords product, but I don't think any search engine could operate under these rules.
Rupert Murdoch, and his extremely powerful company, have lobbied for special rules that harm democracy and free markets.
Google is a private entity, they are able to make their choices.
Australia, and Murdoch are also able to enforce their views.
Let google go. If they do, someone else will come into the Australian market and if they work well with the new laws, it will be a new business model and moat to take on Goog.
Google has a right to decide the taxes are too high and withdraw from the market.
Neither is blackmailing the other. At worst, they're negotiating.
Now it's the corporate world's turn to tell us what to do.
a classic duo