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I hope that Australia follows through on implementing this law. The status quo is economically strangling out the smaller, local and independent news media that gives us divergent information so that we can be better informed and thus better evaluate and make decisions. Look at where we are now in the US. A half dozen or so news corporations own the majority of tv, radio and print news sources. What good has come of that?

If Google pulls out of a market, cool. Some else will replace them. For that matter, Google is not the only search engine crawling the internet to assemble a proprietary index.

My info is dated but some years ago, I was admin for a website and thus had access to the admin level tools. Websites have search engine bots crawling their nonsecure content continuously. Prominent at that time were Google, Bing, Yahoo and less frequently Yandex. Occasionally, there were commercial bots that do for-hire indexing for market research or business reputation kinds of things.

To me, Google wants to get their base data for free then sell the user information for $$$. Nice racket they have going.

Australia, please do not hesitate to kick out Google if they won't play nice. Google is not irreplaceable. Pay no heed to the chicken littles crying that the sky will fall. The sky will not fall. Google is replaceable. The people writ large will be the better for it.