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Google wages war on law

THE GOOGLE search engine continues its war on law. The latest manoeuvre responds to Canada's Bill C-18 receiving Royal Assent on 22 June. The measure follows an Australian law passed in 2021 in allowing newspaper publishers to work together to extract payment from Facebook, Google and the like.

Google marked Canada Day in 2010 as above. Click news.google.ca to see whether it's still serving Canadian news...

Image © Google

Google hates that.

The corporation is prepared, up to a point, to pay publishers of its choosing through its "News Showcase" product. But pay as mandated by law? Not if it can help it.

Details of amounts paid through the News Showcase are commercially confidential. But on the face of it, what Google is doing here is maintaining its monopoly power to set prices. This may in the long run be a bad or disastrous idea for a corporation facing multiple investigations for monopolistic practices - see below..

In Canada Google responded on 29 June with a blog post announcing that it will remove links to Canadian news when Bill comes into force on Tuesday 19 December 2023. It will also terminate the News Showcase in Canada - killing a reported 150 deals with publishers (of its choosing).

The Associated Press reported on 22 June that Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, plans also to remove Canadian news.

The Canadian Association of Journalists responded in a Tweet that "Google & Facebook have shut out Canadian news orgs from their platforms and decided to be dictators of what information Canadians can search, discover and consume. This violates the very foundations of an open internet. Corporate selfishness is kneecapping Canadian democracy."

Jason Kint of the Digital Content Next trade association points out that "essentially the same [law] is working just fine in Australia."

More monopoly woes

Google and Facebook face multiple investigations for monopolistic practices. Another looks likely to be added to the list by reports that it is lying to advertisers about where their ads appear and who sees them. The late June report by Adalytics alleges that, for example, advertisers were charged for ads that ran behind the New York Times paywall and were invisible to users who are not subscribers.

On 22 June newspaper publisher Gannet announced that it is suing Google over its "alleged ad tech monopoly, " in the Southern District of New York Federal court. CNBC notes that this action "echoes" a suit filed by the US Department of Justice on 14 January. Another DoJ case over Google's monopoly in search is awaiting trial, possibly in September.

And on 14 June the European Commission - the civil service of the EU - sent a Statement of Objections to Google over abusive practices in online advertising technology. The Commission preliminarily finds that, since at least 2014, Google abused its dominant positions by: favouring its own ad exchange AdX in the ad selection auction run by its dominant publisher ad server DFP; and favouring its ad exchange AdX in the way its ad buying tools Google Ads and DV360 place bids on ad exchanges. This would be a step towards comprehensive anti-monopoly action.

The EU document concludes: "The Commission's preliminary view is therefore that only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services would address its competition concerns." In other words, that action could include forcing Google to break up its advertising business.

If you think the headline above is hyperbole, while searching for an image we found this from the BBC: Canada is going to war with Google, and it might not win.

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