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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Weaselly words or otherwise, there is a big power imbalance here. The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter. Google has no control over the ACCC.

The ACCC is being irresponsible not dealing with - in precise terms - what Google actually said. Anything less verges on bullying. This isn't a public shouting match between equals.

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> The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter

Not really. Google could just exit Australia. And who you think that would hurt more, Australia or Google?

I think very little of Google; I'd like to see them leave Australia. Australians, of which I am one, are fools to be supporting that sort of centralised data collection. Tear it up, burn it down and throw it out in my humble opinion. I'd rather have incompetents than Google.

"[W]ell they can leave" is true - but the idea that that is something they would 'choose' to do is in my view a philosophical canard. Google is going to make the best economic decision and in that sense they don't really have a choice to make. The ACCC/government is the one with a range of options where they can pick one. And they should be held to a higher standard than bullying companies.

As long as the proposed regulations don't make Google's Australian operations completely unprofitable, they won't.

Based on the last time this was up on HN I recall the news company lobby estimated that Google would be required to pay something like $1B/year, which is certainly far more money than they make off of news-related searches originating in Australia. The law has some prohibitions on Google substituting Australian news with news from sources in other countries, but I think it doesn’t go so far as to say that Google has to continue to serve news searches. Abandoning the country entirely might be a stretch, given how many other products would be impacted, but disabling news results entirely or declining searches that seem to be looking for news would not be surprising. The law is clearly deliberately vague to give both the government and the news companies the upper hand against Google in any sort of legal dispute, but I think Google would be within its rights to take this to court and demand an enumerated list of all of the news companies in Australia (since the law says the government is planning to make a list) and a list of all of the international sources of news that Google is prohibited from substituting, then stop serving results from either in Australia.

Google obviously. F2f

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