Rome, Italy — Google late last week received a piece of bad news as Italy’s Antitrust regulators have expanded their investigation of Google News to include the company’s search engine in that country, according to reports.
According to reports, the investigation began last week by Italy’s Antitrust Authority that now wishes to take a closer look at Google’s overall operation, based on complaints from the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) that the news aggregation site, “Google News Italia,” was making it harder for them to attract users and advertisers.
Google Italy’s offices got searched, and the concept of an $18.5 million fine was mentioned. Google denies the charges.
“Considering that, from the assembled documents, it appears that Google News Italia is managed by the company Google Inc … it is deemed necessary to broaden the ongoing investigation to the company Google Inc.,” the competition watchdog said in a statement on its website (www.agcm.it/).
It mentioned the company has 30 days in which to present its case to competition authorities.
A spokeswoman for Google in Italy was not immediately available for comment.
According to an article published by AGI, Italy’s competition watchdog has stated, “On the basis of inspections by the authority, it has been found that the management of the Google News Italia service, currently under a preliminary investigation, was handled by Google Inc.”
The newspapers have charged that Google’s use of their online material on its Italian website hamper their ability to attract readers and advertisers to their home pages but if they did not allow them to appear on the site they were barred from its search engine.
Google, which accounts for 90 percent online search share of the Italian market is seemingly making regulators to wonder whether Google is having a disproportionate effect on online advertising in Italy.
The antitrust authorities, which commenced the probe under EU law governing the abuse of dominant market position, said it was investigating whether Google was distorting the online advertising market.
Google and its arch rival Yahoo face various complaints from news providers in the United States and elsewhere that their search engines make money from news generated by others. According to some observers, such as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, think Italian regulators are either confused or looking for a fight, given the clear instructions Google has provided on how to opt out of search or news separately.
The original complaint received by the authority from FIEG questioned Google’s use of headlines and snippets of federation members’ news stories on its Google News Italia Web site. Similar complaints have been made by news organizations in other countries, notably in Belgium, where Google eventually reached an agreement with two associations of news publishers, Sofam and Scam, and in France, where Google settled a lawsuit with Agence France Presse.
Google defended itself by stating that it helps newspaper websites make money through online advertising and does not misappropriate content.