Not really. There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms and news carries with it headaches that Google might be relieved to be rid of. Most likely scenario is that Google just deletes news from Australian searches, and Australians just find another aggregator for their news, which will probably be another large American platform that doesn't pay publishers
> There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms
The searches don't need to convert themselves in order to be valuable; if they affect user behavior enough, they'll affect it for commercial queries too. Ie, if someone switches to Bing because they never get good results on Google, they'll probably just switch to Bing period, instead of jumping back to Google for their commercial queries.
It's $1 billion / year, and it's just news searches in Australia. Some database queries will figure out whether it's more profitable to pay up or to disable news searching in Australia, and I'd bet it's gonna be disabling news searches.
It's very possible that the math works out to be , but I disagree that the value of "disabling news searches in Australia" is tightly captured in a database. It's going to require some non-trivial modeling of the effect of removing news on the habits of Australian searchers, and how that may affect commercial queries: it's a very non-trivial part of most people's usage of Google.
Some relevant things to consider:
1) The Australian market provides Google about ~$5B/yr in revenue, so a 20% revenue loss would be required
2) The global PR impact of disabling news searches, even in a local market
3) The future costs of setting the precedent of giving in to rent-seeking mafia tactics from a specific government; if they think it's likely to embolden other governments to do the same thing, it may be worth drawing a bright line despite the revenue costs
