The Australian's Adam Creighton says he believes tech giant Google's "experiment" - where it buried selected news articles from various media publishers - was "clearly a threat" to major news organisations about the future of Australia's media landscape.
Mr Creighton claimed he could not find any articles written by his colleagues when he used the Google search tool, but was able to locate those same articles when using Microsoft search engine "Bing".
"Google did concede yesterday, for one per cent of their users, they decided to remove access to news stories.
"They said it was a random one per cent, or they certainly implied that, but it's very surprising it was a number of journalists who had it removed.
"I think it's very unlikely it's random... of course, they do it to journalists, so we tweet about it as is happening now."
The company said the move was part of a "short term experiment" using an algorithm to hide news stories from commercial media outlets.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hit out at the move which came amid a push - via the media bargaining code - to force Facebook and Google to pay news outlets for featuring their work.
"The timing of this is very obvious. They're obviously firing a shot across the bow in advance of these negotiations," Mr Creighton said.
"You can see from Google and Facebook's point of view. They do not want a precedent set in Australia... whereby they have to pay for news.
"If this happened in other countries, it would be very expensive for them. It's worth stressing they would still make an absolute fortune. Their profits would still be in the billions."
