Australia Considers Its Own Google Antitrust Case

Australia’s competition watchdog will consider its own antitrust case against Google, the commission chairman said Wednesday, October 21, after the US Justice Department sued the company for abusing its dominance in online search and advertising.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims described the US case filed Tuesday as one of the world’s biggest antitrust cases in the past 20 years.

“I’m delighted the DOJ’s taking it on and we’ll follow it really closely,” Mr. Sims told the National Press Club, referring to the US Department of Justice.

“We’re going to look at it and see whether there’s any value in what we might do,” Mr. Sims added.

Separately, Mr. Sims is drafting legislation to address the imbalance in bargaining power between Google and the Australian media businesses that want the tech giant to pay for journalism.

The bills, that will be ready to be introduced to Parliament by December, would empower an arbitrator to make binding decisions on how much Google and Facebook must pay media companies for news content.

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