CANBERRA, Australia – The Australian Prime Minister said on Monday that Microsoft was confident it could fill the gap if Google made its threat to withdraw its search engine from Australia.
A Google executive told a Senate hearing last month that it would likely make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government went ahead with plans to charge tech giants for the news content.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had since spoken to Microsoft MSFT,
CEO Satya Nadella on her Bing search engine filling the space.
“I can tell you, Microsoft is pretty confident” that Australians wouldn’t be worse off, Morrison told the National Press Club of Australia.
“These are big tech companies and what’s important to Australia, I think, is that we set the right rules for our people,” Morrison said.
“Having a news environment in this country that is sustainable and has trade support is vital to the functioning of democracies,” he added.
Although Bing is Australia’s second most popular search engine, it only occupies 3.7% of the market share, the Australian newspaper reported. Alphabet GOOGL,
GOOG,
Google says it takes 95%.
Nadella began the Zoom conversation with Morrison last week, the newspaper reported.
A Microsoft spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government aims to make Google and Facebook FB,
pay Australian media companies fairly to use news content that the tech giants siphon from news sites.
Google has faced pressure from authorities elsewhere to pay for the news. Last month he signed an agreement with a group of French publishers that paved the way for the company to make digital copyright payments. Under the agreement, Google will negotiate individual license agreements with newspapers, with payments based on factors such as the amount published daily and the monthly traffic from Internet sites.
But 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 cannot agree on the price of the news, an arbitral tribunal will make a binding decision on the payment.
Morrison said he would like to see “more alignment between the world’s economies” on these antitrust and competition policy issues.