It absolutely does. One of the headlines in the open letter was "Hurting the free services that you use", and includes:
... the law is set up to ... encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk.
(Edited for brevity and clarity, but you can compare against the original.)
If Google didn't want to give the impression that they would have to start charging, they could have deleted the words "free" and it would still have made sense.
With the "your free services are at risk" messaging, Google was definitely trying to create the fear of a price increase. They didn't say "the quality of your services are at risk".
[1] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...
I think you missed these clear cut sentences: "The proposed changes are not fair and they mean that Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you." and "There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses." which point to service quality and privacy, not price.
It completely unfairly favor news orgs over the rest of the web, it gives publishers extensive control of user discussion about content that they own which is an affront to the principle of free speech, the terms of the forced binding arbitration are incredibly vague and, well, arbitrary.
The ACCC response is also nonsense.
> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.
Google's letter didn't mention anything about charging Australians for the user of its free services at all. If you actually read the open letter [2], it doesn't even contain the words "charge" or "price" or "cost" or "fee" or imply anything about charging users.
> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.
Google never said it had to share "additional user data", whatever that means. It is quite clear in claiming that "Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses." [2] which is absolutely true.
The ACCC is responding to fictitious claims. It's the ACCC response that contained misinformation, not Google's open letter.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
[2] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...