London — With the mounting pressure from competitors and various organizations, regulators in Italy have initiated an inquiry into Google News at the behest of publishers who allege the Mountain View giant of dropping their sites from its search results unless they agreed to be part of Google News.
The inquiry has been initiated in response to a complaint that was filed by an Italian Newspaper Publishers Federation, FIEG, which also denounced that the use of its members’ content on Google News Italia has a negative impact on their ability to attract users and advertisers, the Antitrust Authority said in a statement.
Google News has come under fire in Italy. (Credit: Screenshot by eBrandz)
According to a Wall Street Journal reports, Google’s offices in Italy were searched last week by regulators seeking information that Google compelled Italian news sites to make their copy available through Google News unless they were willing to be excluded from search result pages.
The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers is concerned that Google is exercising its dominant position to prevent publishers from earning their fair share of online ad revenues. Because so much traffic is directed to publisher sites from Google News, the rankings can have an influence how much ad revenue those sites earn.
“Italian publishers, who get no direct payment for the use of their content on Google News, are allegedly unable to choose whether or not to include the news published on their Internet site on the [Google] portal,” the Authority said.
“Google allegedly makes it possible for a publisher to not appear on Google News, but that allegedly involves the exclusion of the publisher’s content from the Google search engine. That is a highly penalizing condition,” the statement said.
According to various reports, Google’s increasing controlling powers across online markets makes them a target of constant scrutiny by antitrust authorities. Google Italy representatives were quoted in several places as saying “The Competition Authority has notified us of a claim against Google Italy. We are finding out more details today, although we do know that it is in relation to Google News, which drives significant traffic and new readers to newspaper Web sites.”
Carlo Malinconico, president of the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers, told the New York Times: “Publishers provide much of the content on the internet, but they get nearly nothing for it. This is not fair, in our opinion. Our feeling is we lose more than we gain.”
Full details of what is being investigated are not yet available, but Google has confirmed the investigation is going ahead.
Senior Business Product Manager of Google News, Josh Cohen has responded in Google’s European Public Privacy Blog that Google is “still reviewing this claim,” but stresses that inclusion in Google News is entirely at the behest of publishers.
Cohen states: “We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we have made it easy to opt out of our services.”
Google News collects and publishes stories from more than 25,000 news sites, which definitely becomes a sensitive spot for many publishing companies, who feel Google’s news aggregation site siphons readers from their own Web sites.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, appeared before Congress in May to protect Google against such charges, saying that Google sends an impressive amount of traffic–which can be turned into ad revenue–to newspaper Web sites for free.
Cohen emphasizes the advantages of publishing to Google News for attracting significant attention to publishers’ sites, stating: “When it comes to Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for removal. That is because publishers understand that the traffic generated by Google News, and services like it, provide valuable traffic.”
“Cohen also disclosed that Google News sends over 1 billion clicks per month to news publishers.”
“News providers — like any website publisher — are in absolute control when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google services. So if a news publisher does not wish to be found on Google.com, Google.it or any other reputable search engines, it can prevent indexation automatically via a universally accepted Internet standard called robots.txt. Publishers also have a range of other ways of controlling how their content appears or doesn’t. One such option is for a publisher to continue to appear in Google web search, but not in Google News,” Google responded in a blog post.
Separately, the EU commissioner for media, Viviane Reding, has said she supports Google’s project to digitize books and make them available online.
A deal that permits Google to do so in the US has been disapproved by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, with the result that the US Justice Department is now examining it.
However, Reding said this week: “Google Books is a commercial project created by an important player. It is good to see that new business models are developing which could allow bringing more content to an increasing number of consumers.”