Media companies file new complaint over Google search and news
News Corp. Adds to Google Antitrust Woes on Android,
Search
By Stephanie Bodoni and Aoife White
April 18, 2016 — 3:37 AM PDT Updated on April 18, 2016 —
7:34 AM PDT
Google’s antitrust woes in the European Union are
growing, as News Corp. filed a new complaint against the legality of the U.S.
tech giant’s search and news services at the same time as EU regulators are
preparing a formal complaint on its Android mobile-phone operating system.
The complaint by the owner of the Times of London and the
Sun papers argues that Google keeps users within its own services by displaying
enough news content to deter people clicking through to the publishers’ sites
that produced it -- meaning they lose potential ad revenue. Separately, the EU
may be gearing up to send Google a statement of objections, laying out its
antitrust concerns, in the Android probe.
“Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and
operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for
themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways
that new apps can reach customers,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe
Vestager said Monday in a speech about the Android probe in Amsterdam.
Regulatory concerns for Alphabet Inc.’s Google are
ratcheting up, more than a year after EU lawmakers voted to break up the
company if investigators didn’t act. Privacy officials have also slammed its
reaction to a top court order to remove personal information from search
results on demand.
News Corp. declined comment on the new complaint. Google
spokesman Al Verney didn’t immediately respond to a call and e-mail seeking
comment.
Assessment
The European Commission received a new complaint that “it
will now assess,” EU spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said on Monday in response to a
question about News Corp.
Google’s search engine and Google News protect and
reinforce the general search dominance by offering scraped information on the
Google services and preventing people from going to the actual news publishers’
Web sites, according to a person familiar with the new complaint who asked to
not identified because the deliberations were confidential. That means the
media companies don’t get page hits, cutting advertising income.
News publishers have been some of the most active forces
calling for EU action to clamp down on what they say is Google’s growing power
to direct traffic to their sites. Some have pushed for Google to pay an EU-wide
fee for showing news content, mirroring a Spanish law passed in 2014.
Fears
"We are afraid of Google," Mathias Doepfner,
chief executive officer of Germany’s largest publisher, Axel Springer, said in
an open letter published in 2014 that helped build opposition to an attempted
EU settlement with Google.
While part of publishers concerns’ cover Google’s use of
content, a coalition of news groups also alleges that its advertising and
analytics services has unfairly squeezed out rivals. The EU has also been stepping
up scrutiny of Google’s advertising business in recent months.
Publishers’ complaints raise issues beyond the scope of
competition law, Vestager’s predecessor Joaquin Almunia said in 2014.
News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson met with Vestager last
month to discuss Google and said in a statement that the company has “yet to
see concrete meaningful action” from Google “that contradicts our impressions
that the company routinely exploits its market dominance and has little
appreciation of the commercial or social value of high-quality journalism.”
First Complaint
Google lashed back at News Corp.’s first complaint to the
EU in 2014, saying it wasn’t a gatekeeper to the Internet and news providers
need to get used to face up to "much stiffer competition for people’s
attention and for advertising euros."
The way the EU ramped up the Android probe follows a
similar pattern to last year’s escalation of a separate case targeting Google’s
comparison shopping-search service. The company received antitrust objections
just weeks after rivals got EU requests to declassify documents, similar to
those competitors recently got in the Android probe.
More than five years after the EU opened a separate
investigation into Google’s search business, it’s still weighing whether to
fine Google or order the company to change its business practices. In previous
antitrust cases, the EU has forced Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. to pay
billions of euros in fines.
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