Google decided to blackmail Australia. This country will disable the search engine if the Australian parliament passes a law that could deprive the IT corporation of a considerable share of revenue. Facebook also joined the ultimatum. This is a precedent in world history. From now on, no one knows which next sovereign country the IT giants will present an ultimatum tomorrow. Is Russia waiting for such a scenario and how can it respond?
Google has threatened to shut down its search engine for the entire territory of Australia. The threat will be carried out if a law comes into force there that obliges multinational Internet companies to pay local media if a user clicks on links to the pages of publications. If the corporation does not voluntarily determine the amount of deductions, then the price tag will be forcibly set by a state-appointed arbitrator. At the same time, Google Australia's revenue in 2019 was $ 3.7 billion. Most of this amount was brought by advertising.
The law, which is still being debated in parliament, was developed by the government Commission for the protection of competition and Consumer Protection of Australia. It threatens to hit the interests of another IT giant-the social network Facebook. She also presented Canberra with an ultimatum, though not so radical-she threatened to simply remove the news from the feeds of all Australian users.
Thus, 19 million Australians who regularly use Google risk losing the search engine, and 17 million Australians who log in to Facebook every month will not be able to see or publish news on their pages.
The ultimatum on behalf of the corporation was announced by the representative of its Australian branch, Mel Silva, speaking at a hearing in parliament. In his opinion, the bill will create a "dangerous precedent" for paying for links in the virtual space. Therefore, the corporation has no choice but to "terminate access to Google Search in Australia".
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has already responded that the government will not respond to Google's threats. "Let me explain. Australia sets its own rules about what you can do in Australia. This is done through our parliament. And this is being implemented by our government. That's how things work here in Australia, and people who want to work by our rules are always welcome. But at the same time, we will not respond to threats," the head of government assured (translated by the newspaper VZGLYAD).
Reset Australia, an organization that specializes in regulating large technology companies, has already said that Google is bullying Australia.
"The current blatant threats show that Google has the body of a monster and the mind of a scoundrel",
Chris Cooper, the organization's executive director, was outraged. "When a private corporation tries to use its monopoly power to threaten and intimidate a sovereign country, it is a sure sign that regulation is long overdue," Cooper was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
The ultimatum sounded in Canberra caused alarm on the other side of the planet – in Russia. "This is the first world precedent of this kind. And it is dangerous for us, because the American IT giants will not stand on ceremony with Russia. They will continue to try to discriminate against our country, " Gevorg Mirzayan, an associate professor at the Political Science Department of the Financial University under the government, told VZGLYAD. "Unlike Australia, we do not belong to the Anglo-Saxon Western bloc. Therefore, in relation to Russia, the company's administrators can not adhere to even a minimum of piety. There are no taboos here, " Mirzayan explained.
"The situation in which supranational IT corporations directly and openly blackmail an entire state, and a rather large one, and put forward conditions, is simply wild. This is a terrible dream and the most impossible dystopia, " said Alexander Malkevich, First Deputy Chairman of the commission of the Public Chamber of Russia for the development of the information Society. "These corporations have put themselves above any laws and any states. They try to dictate their will not only to the users to whom they impose unnecessary services and targeted advertising, but also to dictate their will to sovereign countries. In this way, they are trying to bring them to their knees, " the source said.
The director of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC), Sergey Plugotarenko, on the contrary, is optimistic. In his opinion, the scandal in Australia showed that the authorities of individual countries are finally beginning to put under control the "supranational" methods of international corporations. "The world is moving into a new reality, where the digital economy is becoming less global. And this is starting to happen now, even in English-speaking countries, " he said.
"It is remarkable that Russia, unlike almost all other countries, not counting some Asian ones, has its own IT leaders. They confidently compete with international players, and in some cases even outperform them in our local market, " the source recalled. According to the expert, " the next step that the IT industry should take together with the state is the international expansion of our successful IT players and digital services, so that competition continues in foreign markets for us."
In fact, it has already happened that Google was turned off on the scale of an entire country, said Igor Ashmanov, CEO of Ashmanov and Partners. He recalled that this happened in the noughties with China, when Google was at war with the Chinese government – in particular, secretly developing a platform for the Middle Kingdom that was inaccessible to the Chinese state security service. The founder of Google, a native of Leningrad who emigrated to the United States, Sergey Brin, spent a lot of money on his war with Beijing, Ashmanov recalled, and conducted it for purely ideological, not commercial reasons.
With Russia, a completely different story, says Ashmanov. "They won't disconnect us from Google like they do Australia. We recently had an Open Skies Treaty with the United States, meaning we allowed Americans to fly in our skies. This analogy is also relevant in the case of the Google search engine. Who will voluntarily refuse it?" the expert asks rhetorically. According to him, until Russia presses Google technically and legally, the corporation will "fly" in Russia, performing the function of the "eye" of Washington.
The most difficult task for Russia, according to Ashmanov – is to deprive one of Google's main services, namely YouTube, of its monopoly. "It is necessary to drag its audience to Russian video hosting sites, and most importantly - to transplant the business that lives on this platform. Let's say we block YouTube, fill the initial database of videos on our hosting. But then you need to interest bloggers who earn money from advertising and advertisers themselves. To do this, most likely, you will need to offer better conditions, burn some amount of money, so that this " car "will start," the expert said.
As Ashmanov hopes, foreign investors can join our future digital counterparts: "If the US continues its idiocy with the imposition of censorship in Google and Facebook, they will only help us in this."
Alexander Rybin, Natalia Makarova, Andrey Samokhin