Google must be broken up due to its 'overwhelming' power, News Corp says
Google must be
broken up due to its 'overwhelming' power, News Corp says
Media giant tells Australian
inquiry Google’s search engine and advertising platform should be separated
Google should
be broken up to restore a level playing field for media companies swamped by
its “overwhelming” market power, News Corp has told the competition regulator.
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm
has argued in a submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission that Google’s search engine and third-party advertising platform be
separated to make it easier for digital publishers to compete for advertising.
Alphabet, Google’s parent, is in a high stakes
battle with News Corp as the global media company struggles to claw back the
billions of dollars in advertising revenue which has flowed to Google from its
newspapers in the past decade.
The latest suggestion is an
interventionist step which the ACCC stopped short of recommending in its preliminary report on the digital platforms
inquiry in December.
“Google operates in a
‘walled garden’ whereby its related businesses, particularly in the ad tech
pipeline, secure and entrench Google’s dominance in general internet search,” News Corp said in its submission, released on
Tuesday.
“Google’s market power across the
ad tech services supply chain is overwhelming.”
Ad tech services are all the
products Google offers advertisers – from Google Ads to Google Marketing and
Google Ad Manager – which combine seamlessly with its “trove of personal data”
to make it attractive for advertisers.
News Corp says this “impenetrable
offering” allows Google to dominate, and it should be forced to divest.
“Divestments will work to correct
the market structure, by replacing common ownership with separate ownership,
where each separate owner has incentives to compete to gain the business of
customers,” the submission says.
“News Corp Australia recognises
that divestment in a non-merger context is a highly interventionist measure and
will have significant ramifications.
“Accordingly, News Corp Australia
recommends that this remedy should take the form of an ACCC recommendation to
government, following the conclusion of the inquiry, and should be limited to
Google.”
Speaking on Sky News about the
market concentration of the digital giants, Labor’s digital economy spokesman,
Ed Husic, did not rule out a future Labor government in Australia taking action
against Facebook, as the United States examines whether anti-trust laws should be used to break
up the tech giants.
“It is something that we will be
watching with great interest,” Husic said.
He warned that a “day of reckoning” was coming for Facebook, if it did not correct its behaviour.
He said the company had failed to respond adequately to concerns
it was used to influence the 2016 US election campaign, or how Cambridge Analytica used its data.
“Frankly now, as a result of their
failing to act responsibly, you have US lawmakers seriously entertaining the
notion of whether or not they use anti-trust laws to break them up and Facebook
has got a day of reckoning that is coming as a result of being so big,” he
said.
“They are not a plucky startup
anymore, they are a big player that are influencing the way in which markets
operate, and I think it is something that we look at seriously.”
Husic said the recent case of
presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has suggested Facebook, and other digital giants, be broken up
as part of her election campaign, having her advertisements blocked by the
social media platform was an example of the power it held.
“When I have said to Facebook
previously, there is some Islamaphobia content on its site directed to me
personally [which] was over the top, I asked them, ‘do your community
guidelines allow this to occur’, they said, ‘yes, it would be within the
guidelines’, and yet, if you have an ad that says something bad about Facebook,
bam – it gets taken off in a moment’s notice,” he said.
The chairman of the ACCC, Rod
Sims, is conducting an inquiry into the impact of digital platforms on
competition in media and advertising in Australia. The final report is due on
30 June.
Comments
Post a Comment