Microsoft said on Wednesday it supports Australia s plans to make the biggest digital platforms pay for news and would help small businesses transfer their advertising to Bing if Google quits the country.
Microsoft has been positioning itself to increase market share for its search engine Bing after a Google executive told a Senate hearing last month that it would likely make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government goes ahead with a draft law that would make tech giants pay for news content.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement that he and Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella had told Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher in an online meeting last week that Microsoft fully supports the so-called News Media Bargaining Code.
Microsoft has called Google s bluff in Australia, revealing plans to invest further in its local search engine in response to Google s threats to withdraw services from the country. In a cutting statement aimed at its trillion-dollar rival, Microsoft also revealed its full support of Australia s proposed news media bargaining laws, conceding it would be prepared to pay for news. It added that while other tech companies may sometimes threaten to leave Australia, Microsoft will never make such a threat . The software giant s bold stance came after Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella spoke with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher last week, and followed a threat from Google to withdraw its search engine from Australia to evade laws that would make it pay local media outlets for the news it used on its platform.
It may have seemed the platforms were taking a confident stance by appealing to Australian users directly. But really, it was a delayed and panic-based reaction.
Tuesday, 2 February 2021, 4:16 pm
It’s the sort of stuff that should have been sorted
years ago in Australia: a murderous, frontier society ill
disposed to the indigenous populace; the creation of a
convict colony that was itself an act of invasion rather
than settlement; the theft of land and its rapacious
plunder.
Even some of the rough colonists were not
oblivious to such a crude record. Henry Parkes, in planning
the Centenary celebrations as New South Wales premier in
1888, was
asked by a fellow politician what he would be doing for
the poor and needy for the occasion. Wealthy landed citizens