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1 photoInternet transnational corporations like Google have long surpassed most of the world’s countries in financial capacity. Photo by EPA-Elta
Mel Silva, Google’s chief operating officer for Australia, said in a statement to the country’s Senate that the bill was inappropriate and that the company allegedly failed to calculate financial risk.
Exiting the country’s market is “the only useful option if this law is passed,” he said.
The media content tax bill was presented to the Australian Parliament in December.
If adopted, it would force tech companies to pay the media to show their content, and if the order is not followed, companies could face up to $ 10 million. Fines in Australian dollars (6.36 million euros).
The law would initially apply to Facebook NewsFeed and Google Search.
On Friday, Google, for its part, released a video and letter addressed to consumers in the country expressing its opposition to the bill.
Company spokeswoman M. Silva compared paying news sites to link to their content to recommending cafes to friends, but then received a bill from cafes for mentioning them.
“When the price for links is applied to certain content, the work of search engines is violated and there is no more free and open Internet,” Silva said.
The company would rather pay for media through its Google News Showcase program than for links. More than 200 companies have reportedly signed contracts with the program, Google said, but Australian politicians are still not convinced.
Europe also wants to curb the internet giants
Even before the New Year, European Competition Commissioner Margaret Vestager said the bloc’s bills regulating the activities of Internet giants would “introduce order” and curb market dominance.
“The Law on Digital Services and the Law on Digital Markets will create safe and reliable services while protecting freedom of expression,” he said.
According to the EU, up to 10% of the Internet giants will be threatened by these laws. fines for their turnover if they violate certain competition rules or are likely to be fragmented. It is also proposed to allocate 6% to companies. income fines or a temporary ban on access to the EU market “in case of serious and repeated infringements of the law that endanger European citizens”.
The Digital Services Law, together with the Digital Markets Law, will impose strict conditions for doing business in the 27 EU countries for public authorities to limit the dominance of large technology companies.
Under competition law, ten companies are expected to be considered dominant and special restrictions imposed on them in order to curb their power to dominate the markets.
Companies that would be subject to tighter restrictions include US giants Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and SnapChat, Alibaba and Bytedance from China, Samsung from South Korea and Booking.com from the Netherlands.
The bills will still have to go through a long and complicated ratification process, and the final laws will be influenced by the 27 members of the EU, the European Parliament (EP), a long list of companies and trade associations.
The UK announced in November last year that it would create a body to regulate tech giants like Facebook and Google and help clarify the use of personal data and targeted advertising.
Rolandas Paulauskas, signatory of the Act of Restoration of Independence, policy reviewer comments on the situation:
All those big Internet companies have already become more powerful than many countries in the world and there is nothing strange about that. But let’s remember the beginnings of these Internet companies: they were formed at the initiative of the Pentagon and, at least in the beginning, they were closely associated with military orders. And besides, it was a private business, as in any business, there was an immediate desire to monopolize the market. This business was driven by people controlled by Americans living in the United States, who, without serious competition in the world, naturally dominated the entire global market.
Here is a very interesting nuance. Let’s ask ourselves: how many states can afford to launch a rocket into space? Let’s count about 10 … But now let’s think: how many countries have their own online search engines? Only three: the United States, China and Russia. The same goes for social media: they are also controlled only by these three states, no one else. So the United States has full sovereignty over the internet, followed by China, which has long been disconnected from the US internet space, well, and Russia has little sovereignty in this area. And that’s it, the rest of the world isn’t even a player here …
From a purely commercial point of view, this entire market, with the exception of the Chinese side, is controlled by natural persons controlled by the United States and the United States. And this whole issue works hand in hand with the Pentagon, following purely military orders. There is nothing to wonder about here: if we were in the place of the Americans, we would do the same: when such an instrument arises in your hands and becomes a de facto monopoly in this field, how not to take advantage of it? Another thing is that during all this time, since their inception, those companies have grown on a scale that the world has never seen, because in terms of money and budget, something that Google is much larger than many countries in the world. Everyone’s life and everyone’s. control – no one has had such opportunities before …
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