14 DAY TRIAL // News Corp, the media corporation of Rupert Murdoch, is attacking Google over in Europe after it has written a letter to the European Commission calling for a tougher attitude.
Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, has some pretty harsh words to say about Google. He states that the “shining vision” that Google’s founders once had has been replaced by “a cynical management,” reports the BBC.
Furthermore, he states that Google has turned into a platform for piracy, despite the Internet giant’s efforts to deal with such issues.
News Corp is hoping to get the European Commission to reject Google’s settlement proposal, although the commission has already confirmed that it is once more looking into the deal after receiving numerous complaints over the summer.
The letter, which is addressed to Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, states that the Google’s dominance will lead to a less informed society and to a more vexatious dialogue.
News Corp’s beef seems to be the fact that news sites have been undermined by aggregation of content and that readers have been “socialized into accepting this egregious aggregation as the norm.”
Of course, the bigger problem is the fact that The Times, The Sun and the Wall Street Journal Europe, as well as the book publisher HarperCollins, are at a disadvantage due to Google’s algorithm.
While Germany might want to get Google to reveal its algorithms so that people can know how the company’s ranking system works, that’s not going to happen. It is known, however, that Google gives a lot of weight to the content quality, something that some of Murdoch’s newspapers have been accused of lacking.
Google’s ad business is another sore spot
Thomson also accused Google of taking unfair advantage of its powers to sell advertising while targeting specific audiences at discounted rates. This, he says, undermines specialist publishers’ ability to generate advertising revenue.
On the other hand, Google continues to state that most of the world’s newspapers get most of their traffic via their homepage and not from Google itself. The company insists that despite what everyone seems to think, it’s not the gateway to the Internet.
The allegation that Google is a platform for piracy is just as silly since the search engine does what all other similar tools out there do – aggregate content from all over the Internet, rank it and return it to users interested in a specific topic.