During an Australian Senate hearing, Google threatened to make its searching services unavailable in the country if the news bargaining code is enforced. The code requires companies to pay for journalism content shared on their platforms. Google claims that they support the news industry by sending traffic to their websites. Currently, Google controls over 95% of all research queries in Australia. The main issues regarding the new code include outsourcing the decision of the payment to arbiters in cases of disagreement between tech companies and news outlets and the fact that the platforms will have to reveal changes in their algorithms. 

Google had recently blocked major Australian news outlets from its search engine as part of an experiment.