It reads to me as though Google blinked. I'm sure somewhere, Rupert Murdoch is popping champagne bottles paid for by his ever increasing media in the Australian media bubble.
That could lead to a dominoes scenario where other countries realised they could get by too without the mighty Google.
Those of us that need Google for searching for weird code snippets and the like (though Google seems increasingly failing in the battle against SEO spam) could just use a US VPN. Most people would get by fine on DDG.
What I am waiting to see next is, how will other countries/industries respond? Some countries may institute the same thing as Australia. Other industries may try to take a cut as well.