CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian Prime Minister said on Monday that Microsoft is confident it could fill the gap if Google threatens to remove its search engine from Australia.
A Google executive said during a Senate hearing last month that it would likely make its search engine in Australia unavailable if the government continued to make plans to pay technology giants for news content.
Premier Scott Morrison said he has since spoken to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the search engine Bing filling the space.
“I can tell you, Microsoft is pretty confident” that Australians will not be worse off, “Morrison told the National Press Club of Australia.
“These are big technology companies and what I think is important is that we set the rules that are right for our people,” Morrison said.
“If there is a news environment in this country that is sustainable and commercially supported, then it is essential for the functioning of democracies,” he added.
Although Bing is Australia’s second most popular search engine, it accounts for only 3.7% of the market share, reports The Australian. Google says it takes 95%.
Nadella began the Zoom conversation with Morrison last week, the newspaper reported.
A Microsoft spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government aims to make Google and Facebook pay Australian media companies fairly for the use of news content that sifts the technological giants of news sites.
Google has come under pressure from authorities elsewhere to pay for news. Last month, it 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 licensing agreements with newspapers, with payments based on factors such as the amount published daily and the monthly traffic to the site.
But Google opposes the Australian plan because it will have less control over how much it will have to pay. According to the Australian system, an arbitration panel will make a binding decision on payment if an online platform and a news business cannot agree on a price for news.
Morrison said he wanted to see “more alignment between the world’s economies” on such antitrust and competition policy issues.