Google's Australian division has taken a stance against a planned levy on internet aggregators that the government wants to impose in order to help the country's journalism industry. A government committee recently heard that up to 3,000 jobs in Australian journalism had been lost in the past five years, due to internet aggregators. In order to help curtail this issue, it was suggested that companies like Google should help to prop up the industry. However, the managing director of Google Australia, Jason Pellegrino, responded by saying that “the setting of rules is the job of government”, adding that “handouts, regulations and intervention” were not the answer. Pellegrino added that levies had proven not to be an effective answer to such problems, saying that the challenge came from “shifting consumer behaviour”.
