Software giant Microsoft Corp is confident that its search product Bing can fill the gap in Australia if Google pulls its search over required payments to media outlets, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday.
Australia has introduced laws that would force Internet giant Google and social media heavyweight Facebook Inc to negotiate payments to domestic media outlets whose content links drive traffic to their platforms.
However, the firms have called the laws unworkable and last month said they would withdraw key services from Australia if the regulations went ahead.
Those services include Google’s search engine, which has 94 percent of the country’s search market, according to industry data.
Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella has since spoken with Morrison about the new rules, the tech company told reporters, and Morrison said the software company was ready to grow the presence of its search tool Bing, the distant No. 2 player.
“I can tell you, Microsoft’s pretty confident, when I spoke to Satya,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra, without giving further detail of the conversation.
“We just want the rules in the digital world to be the same that exist in the real world, in the physical world,” Morrison added.
A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that the discussion took place, but declined to comment, because the company was not directly involved in the laws.
“We recognize the importance of a vibrant media sector and public interest journalism in a democracy and we recognize the challenges the media sector has faced over many years through changing business models and consumer preferences,” the spokeswoman said.
Google declined to comment.
A day earlier, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said that Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg had requested a meeting over the law, and that they had talked, but that he would not back down on the change.
At an Australian Senate hearing into the laws, Australian Department of the Treasury Deputy Secretary of Markets Meghan Quinn said the Australian government would have limited ability to intervene if Google’s departure hurt businesses that rely on its search function.
“The [media bargaining] code doesn’t prevent the wholesale withdrawal of services, and there’s difficulty in any of the legislative mechanisms we’ve got for someone to [be forced to] provide a service,” Quinn said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day