Also, they never threatened to withdraw search altogether. I watched the parliamentary hearing live and from what I heard, they insinuated they may not continue "some services or features" if the laws are passed as-is.
Honestly though, the idea that Google should pay just for showing article links in results is absurd. Snippets is at best slightly more of an argument, but honestly they're making use of the og meta tags that these news sites have put in their website themselves.
It sets a horrible precedent if you have to pay others for the crime of linking to their content.
Now if Facebook follows suit, even so much better. It'd be a huge win for privacy.
Would other search engines not be subject to the same rules? Not much detail in the article but if there's a rule that you have to pay to link to the news sites and you have to include them in results, I don't think many alternative search engines would want to participate either
If Google shut down for just a few days, competing engines would quickly gather click data, and would rapidly be able to close the gap.
Add that to the fact users will change their default search engines away during any Google shutdown, and very negative Google press, and you have a recipe for Google losing the entire market.
Australians would just switch over to one of the other search engines like DuckDuckGo. Unlike Gmail, YouTube and some other Google services, Search isn’t that sticky and is easy to replace.