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by SyneRyder 2120 days ago
> Google's letter didn't mention anything about charging Australians for the user of its free services at all.

It absolutely does. One of the headlines in the open letter was "Hurting the free services that you use", and includes:

... the law is set up to ... encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk.

(Edited for brevity and clarity, but you can compare against the original.)

If Google didn't want to give the impression that they would have to start charging, they could have deleted the words "free" and it would still have made sense.

With the "your free services are at risk" messaging, Google was definitely trying to create the fear of a price increase. They didn't say "the quality of your services are at risk".

[1] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...
1 comments
themacguffinman 2120 days ago
> They didn't say "the quality of your services are at risk".

I think you missed these clear cut sentences: "The proposed changes are not fair and they mean that Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you." and "There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses." which point to service quality and privacy, not price.

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