In effect, all this goes against U.S. laws that prohibit the payment of bribes to foreign entities in order gain or maintain access to a particular market or country.
It's not a bribe if it's law.
Unlike a Westerner, Pichai's responses have been too weak to fight back against the extortion of and demands of bribes from an American company by Australia, and by a few large countries in Western Europe (these include Germany and France).
If you want to do business in a country, you have to abide by that country's laws.
Efforts (if any) by the U.S. government to protect American companies from being coerced to pay bribes have been flaccid.
There isn't anything that the US government can do about it. Other than trying to coerce that foreign country to drop those laws. But that would, frankly, be unethical behaviour on the part of the US government, so I'm glad they didn't stoop to that level. The US govt has already forced DMCA-like laws into Australia. The copyright term has also been extended to be US-like. I think that's enough meddling by the US. I mean, really, 70 years after an author's death?! That's absurd to the point of despair.
Now I do agree with you in part. Forcing a news collector to pay news sources to link to their news articles, especially when those news sources provide this (mostly) free to the general internet, isn't what I'd call fair play.
Though to look on the positive side of things, it does manage to tie up the equation of funding those news sources. From what I understand, journalism in Australia had been going through a downward spiral, with journalists being let go to cut costs. This law has helped to ensure that Australia retains some of these quality journalists. And for a healthy democracy, quality journalism is an essential piece.
So if you look at it that way, this law is helping Australia to be a better democracy. That can't be a bad thing.
Yeah, some will also be going into Murdoch's back pocket. Can't be helped, unfortunately. The devil has to take his percentage. Main thing is, this law is definitely having a positive effect on journalism in Australia. The positives outweigh the negatives. For that, I support it.