PremiumNEW DELHI: The Competition Commission of India has ordered an investigation against tech giant Google for abusing its position among news publishers, a statement from the Indian Newspaper Society said.
“INS has stated Alphabet Inc, which is the parent company of Google, Google LLC, Google India Pvt Ltd, Google Ireland Ltd, and Google Asia Pacific were abusing their dominant position in the News Referral Services and Google Ad Tech Services in the Indian online news media market, which was in violation of Section 4 of the Competition Act, 2002," an INS statement said.
The Society has also alleged that the publishers of news were not being paid a fair value for the content they produced and put out on their digital platforms, despite having invested heavily in the same.
Several countries like Australia, France and Spain have passed legislations directing tech companies like Google to adequately compensate news producers for using their content on search results.
“The news media houses are completely kept in the dark on the total advertising revenue collected by Google and what the actual percentage of the advertising revenue is being transferred to media organisations," the statement said while pointing out the European Publishers Council had also filed a competition complaint against Google for abusing its dominant position.
The CCI, after examining the contentions of INS, has found that these allegations of abuse of dominant position are under the purview of the Competition Act, 2002 and that it requires a detailed investigation by the Director General. CCI has therefore passed an order to club the information submitted by INS with those made by the Digital News Publishers Association who have similar contentions.
Last February too, INS had asked Google to compensate newspapers for the use of content published by them and sought a larger share of its advertising revenue. In a letter to Google India country manager Sanjay Gupta, INS president L. Adimoolam had said the search engine should pay for news generated by newspapers, which employ thousands of journalists at considerable expense for gathering and verifying information.
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