Google Under Antitrust Investigation in Italy

With the increasing pressure from competitors and various organizations it was bound to happen eventually so now Google is getting investigated by competition authorities. But, while most of the attention has been focused on the US, it’s the Italians that made the first move after several newspapers complained about the company's News aggregator. The Italian Competition Authority has notified Google of the investigation by showing up at its offices in Milan and looking for evidence that the search giant had conditioned the inclusion in its search results with the inclusion in News.

The publishers' arguments are the same ones being told over and over by news publishers around the world and especially in the US. The newspapers argue that Google makes big sums of money using their content while they can barely make ends meet, which they believe is “not fair.” However, the complaint to the Italian authorities concerns Google's “lack of transparency” in the way it ranks news stories both in its search engine but especially in News.

But what made the authorities show up at Google's doorstep is the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers' (FIEG) claim that the newspapers were “forced” to make their content available through the News service or face being excluded from the main search engine as well. Google says it hasn't had time to review the claim in its entirety but that the main arguments are false as publishers are free to remove their sites from Google News without affecting the regular search results.

“News providers – like any website publisher – are in complete control when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google services. So if a news publisher doesn’t want 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.