Microsoft said on Wednesday it supports Australia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cMicrosoft fully supports\u201d the so-called News Media Bargaining Code.<\/p>\n
Morrison this week confirmed he had spoken to Nadella about Bing replacing Google in Australia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can tell you, Microsoft\u2019s pretty confident\u201d that Australians would not be worse off, Morrison said on Monday.<\/p>\n
Smith said he had assured the government leaders that small businesses who wished to transfer their advertising from Google to Bing could do so simply and without transfer costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that the current legislative proposal represents a fundamental step towards a more level playing field and a fairer digital ecosystem for consumers, business and society,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
Although Bing is Australia\u2019s second most popular search engine, it has only a 3.6 per cent market share, according to web analytics service Statcounter. Google says it has 95 per cent.<\/p>\n
Swinburne University senior lecturer on media Belinda Barnet said Bing and other search engines could fill the void left by Google and deliver benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople need to realise it will not be personalised in the sense that Google advertising in searches is, so Bing doesn\u2019t know and frankly doesn\u2019t care that you\u2019re in the market for yoga pants, for example,\u201d Barnet said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of these platforms, Google and Facebook in particular, feed you more misinformation if you\u2019re already prone to clicking on misnformation, so they create this echo chamber, in a sense,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut a product like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia is not going to know that in the past you\u2019ve looked at 100 articles about how vaccines are bad and they will just give you the most accurate information that they can find.\u201d Peter Strong, chief executive of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, an advocacy group, expected the disruption to small businesses created by Google\u2019s departure from Australia would be short lived.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not panicking,\u201d Strong said. \u201cBut it would have a short-term impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be a bad thing if Google quits, but if Bing took over, the situation would be the same,\u201d he added. \u201cOne organisation has the capacity to blackmail a country and that should never happen,\u201d he said, calling for more government regulation.<\/p>\n
The mandatory code proposed by the government aims to make Google and Facebook pay Australian media companies fairly for using news content the tech giants siphon from news sites.<\/p>\n
There are no plans to make smaller search engines such as Bing pay for linking users to Australian news, but the government has not ruled that option out.<\/p>\n
Google has faced pressure from authorities elsewhere to pay for news. Last month, it signed a deal with a group of French publishers paving the way for the company to make digital copyright payments. Under the agreement, Google will negotiate individual licensing deals with newspapers, with payments based on factors such as the amount published daily and monthly internet site traffic.<\/p>\n
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 can\u2019t agree on a price for news, an arbitration panel will make a binding decision on payment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Microsoft said on Wednesday it supports Australia\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}