What will happen if Google makes good on threat to withdraw from Australia

Google has threatened to stop making its search engine available in Australia if it’s forced to pay Australian news outlets for showing links to their content.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pushed back against Google, saying “we don’t respond to threats”.

But technology expert and host of the Technology Uncorked podcast, Geoff Quattromani, says it would be “a massive problem” if Google made good on its threat and pulled out of Australia.

“It’s not just the Google search box that we always use,” he told Ross and Russel.

“If you use Gmail and the search function within that … how we search on Google Maps, and even YouTube is owned by Google as well, so looking up videos on YouTube might be a bit more difficult.

“It makes it almost impossible [to search].”

About 90 per cent of internet searches are done on Google, with other players such as Bing and Yahoo making up the balance.

Mr Quattromani says if Australians were forced to use alternative search engines, they’d notice a big difference.

“If you do go into Bing to look something up, and you do the same search on Google, the results are vastly different, so the impression you have on the internet would look vastly different.”

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