A few months after the snippet tax was agreed to as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there planned to make Internet companies pay newspapers for sending the latter extra traffic, by imposing something called the News Media Bargaining Code. In a blog post from December 2020, Mel Silva, VP, Google Australia & New Zealand, gave a good analysis of why Australia’s proposed Code was antithetical to the way the Web worked, including the following:
It forces Google to pay to show links in an unprecedented intervention that would fundamentally break how search engines work. No website and no search engine pays to connect people to other websites, yet the Code would force Google to include and pay for links to news websites in the search results you see. This sets the groundwork to unravel the key principles of the open internet people use every day — something neither a search engine nor anyone who enjoys the benefits of the free and open web should accept.
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