The full situation is pretty nuanced, and I don’t claim to understand all of it, but I have to say the Australian government significantly overreached (in support of their Big News buddies) and Microsoft’s opportunism was not great.

Google was always willing to pay the news publishers, but wasn’t happy with some of the original terms of the law, including: a) having to pay to link to news websites in the normal search results; and b) having to include those links in the search results in the first place (they weren’t allowed to stop linking to news sites in the normal search results).

There were other aspects they weren’t happy with, but that was the biggest and as I said, it was overreach by the government. I mean when you have Tim Berners Lee saying it “could make the web unworkable around the world”, you know you’ve gone too far!