News Corp Submission Urges ACCC To Break Up Google
News Corporation Australia has recommended to the ACCC that Google be broken up, due to its unprecedented dominance in the search engine space and the way it supplies news content from publisher to end user.
The call was contained in a submission to the ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry.
News Corp has never suggested that Google or any one of its other rival media companies be broken up in any other jurisdiction before.
Google’s ever-expanding dominance has become a major concern for regulators globally, as has the influence of social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
The ACCC is examining the impact of these companies “on the supply of news and journalistic content and the implications of this for media content creators, advertisers and consumers”.
Google has always claimed that its search engine is completely impartial because all information is literally one click away, but News Corp claims that Google acts as more than a gateway but also an ‘intermediator’ between publisher and end user, thereby generating revenue for itself at the expense of publishers such as News.
“Google’s prior conduct suggests that more permanent and possibly structural interventions would better preserve the incentives for continued investment in journalism,” News Corp Australia said in the submission.
News Corp has complained a lot recently about the inherent left-wing biases of Facebook, Twitter and Google against the causes it has generally championed, somewhat ironically, from the other side of the political fence.
Google was hit with a record $7 billion fine in Europe in July and ordered it to stop using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals. That fine, which surpassed the $4 billion penalty imposed on the company last year, represented only a bit more than a fortnight’s revenue at the time.