14 DAY TRIAL // An antitrust investigation concerning Google ended in Italy after the company made several pledges calming the fears of newspaper publishers. The complaint was that Google was making money from the publishers' content by listing it in Google News. What's more, they also claimed that Google was conditioning the inclusion in generic search results with the inclusion in Google News.
The antitrust authorities have closed the investigation after Google made it easier for publishers to opt-out of News while still being included in the search results, which was possible before as well.
Google also pledged to be more transparent about its revenue share from the ad it serves. The company had already revealed its AdSense revenue split last year.
Several publishers complained in 2009 that Google was treating them unfairly. Not only was the company profiting by sending people to their sites it was also strong-arming them into being included in News. There has never been such a provision, publishers could opt-out of Google News without affecting search results.
The real issue was that they didn't want the traffic from Google News but they did want the traffic they got from searches, both for free.
This because, they claimed, people reading the small blurbs in News would not bother clicking through and reading the whole article on the site, indicating that all of the valuable information in those articles could be encapsulated in just a few sentences. A much better option, they believed, was for users to not read anything and not be aware of the articles at all.
In the end Google pledged to make it easier to block inclusion in Google News. It also said it will be more transparent about revenue from ads. Early in 2010, Google made waves by finally disclosing the revenue split in AdSense.
So the company is not really pledging to anything that it wasn't already doing. But the publishers can now boast a 'victory' against the mighty Google.
But there may be more to this as the antitrust authorities in Italy are now saying that the whole thing happened because the copyright laws in the country were not fit to handle the way the web works.
While it's true that copyright legislation in many countries is awfully out of date, it seems that the intention of the Italian authorities is to 'regulate' aggregators and other sites that use excerpt of content from other sources something that would fall under the fair use provision in the US.