Google partners brace for hit as search giant threatens Australia exit

Google’s threatened shutdown of its search engine in Australia over a proposed content licensing law would ripple across industries, saddling partners like Apple with a sudden revenue gap and retailers as varied as affordable Kmart to upmarket David Jones with a supply of potentially useless gadgets.

The Alphabet-owned company last month said it would likely pull its core search function from Australia if the government pushes ahead with a plan to require it and Facebook to pay media companies an indeterminate fee for news snippets shown on their services.

Google and Facebook are fighting the first-of-its-kind “News Media Bargaining Code” as other countries consider similar efforts to aid publishers that have lost ad sales to the tech companies. In a sign of the Australian effort’s potential to shake up the industry, Microsoft Corp – whose Bing search engine stands to benefit from any Google retreat – on Thursday called for the United States to adopt a similar law.