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Google Is Being Unfair To Media Companies

By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2022-03-26 14:54:39

About the Author

Sunil Garodia The India Commentary view

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is going to probe a complaint by The Indian Newspaper Society (INS) against Google that it is using its dominant market position as news aggregator to short change content producers (media companies) by denying them rightful share of earnings. INS also alleged that Google is not transparent and has end-to-end control over the advertising value chain which works on technology, which means that it never shares the revenue figures with media companies and they have to be satisfied with what Google pays them.

This charge against Google is being levied worldwide. A competition complaint has also been filed by the European Publishers Council. In a major development, Australia had become the first country in February 2021 to make tech giants pay media companies for the news they carried on their platforms, despite Google's threat to leave the country. It passed an anti-trust law to facilitate this. Google tried to counter this by striking deals with major media companies. That, in a way, is a much better option as media companies will be aware how much they will get for providing the content. But it also carries the risk of completely sidelining smaller media companies.

It is true that media companies, being producers of news and opinion content, invest heavily to generate such content. When Google or any other online news aggregator carries this content free of cost and earns money from it through advertising revenue, ideally a major share of the revenue earned should be paid to the content producers. But by keeping the earnings part hidden from media companies, Google is obviously abusing its dominant position and sharing the revenue arbitrarily. This has to stop. Google must be transparent in sharing the details of advertising revenue earned and must give news content producers a fair share of the earnings. 

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