What you need to know about Google vs Australia

Google has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia over the nation's attempt to make the tech giant share royalties with news publishers. Australia is introducing a world-first law to make Google, Facebook and potentially other tech companies pay media outlets for their news content.

Though Australia is far from Google's largest market, the proposed news code is seen as a possible global test case for how governments could seek to regulate big tech firms. Read the full article via BBC. 

Facebook and Google are still fighting Australia's Media Bargaining Code

Respectively calling it 'one-sided' and 'unworkable', while Twitter has raised its own concerns with the Bill as the companies prepare to face future implications of any agreement. The bargaining code, according to the government, is necessary to address the fundamental bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms. Read the full article via ZDNet.

Google agrees to pay French publishers for news

The agreement comes after several months of talks between Google France and France’s Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale. Google said it would negotiate individual licenses with members of the alliance. France’s competition regulator ruled last year that Google must pay publishing firms and news agencies for reusing their content. Read the full article via CNBC.

Australian publishers on the impossibility of negotiating with Google

Premium news publishers in Australia today outlined the moveable, and impenetrable, feast that is negotiation with Google. They told a Senate inquiry that Google and Facebook act like monopolies because they are monopolies. Read the full article via AdNews.

No more Google searching? Big tech and publishers reach for their guns

If the internet is the modern Wild West, Google has emerged as the tough town of Tombstone, and Facebook as Dodge City. Google’s gunslingers have gone so far as threatening to send their own Australian search engine on a one-way trip to the Boot Hill graveyard if the Australian government doesn’t back down from an attempt to force them to pay up. Read the full article via The Age.