Silvas warning stems from a proposed law that would require Google and Facebook to negotiate with news outlets and pay for news content featured on their platforms. Australian regulators say the tech giants benefit from publishing news generated by others, but Google and Facebook are so dominant in search and social, respectively, that publishers cant make them pay for it.
Its not the first time a country has tried to force Google and Facebook to pay media companies for republishing their news. In response, the company removed the Google News service from Spain and took Spanish publishers off its news service globally.
Google was ordered back to the bargaining table this year after it removed French publishers snippets from its search results and did not pay for links.
In response, Google is pitting itself against big media companies and appealing to the Australian public to oppose the proposal.
Regulators and media executives around the world are watching to see if Australia can succeed where others have stumbled. The Australian approach could set a global precedent, says Belinda Barnet, a senior lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology.
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