Researched by: Sara Varghese & Ankita Ghosh 

First, the allegations

Who is complaining? The complaint with the CCI was filed by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA)—an industry association of the biggest media players such as India Today Group, Indian Express, The Times of India, Malayala Manorama etc. Not included in this group: smaller, independent digital publishers like Scroll, The Wire, The News Minute etc. They have their own group called Digipub—and are partnering with Google to foster news startups in India.

What’s the complaint? Here are the main points of contention:

• Most people discover a news outlet or news story via Google search. And whether they do so or not is arbitrarily decided by the company’s search algorithm.
• Google unilaterally decides whether or not it will pay publishers for content displayed in the search results. For example: it does not pay a dime for ‘snippets’—the bit of text, image or short video that shows up as part of a link.
• Publishers also rely on Google for a great chunk of their advertising revenue—earned via those annoying display ads. But they receive only 51% of the revenue generated. And Google doesn’t share information about the revenue it earns from those display ads.
• Google has launched a number of its own news products—like Google News, Google News Showcase—that essentially cannibalise news content from publishers. And it uses them to dictate what news sites and links will be seen by a user.
• A number of technologies developed to optimise user experience—like ‘zero click’ searches (explained below)—actually erode traffic to a news site, and therefore its revenues.

The CCI’s view: The commission found merit in the complaint, noting the unequal relationship between Google and news companies: “They are dependent on Google for the majority of the traffic, which makes it an indispensable trading partner. News publishers have no choice but to accept the terms and conditions imposed by Google.”

The global media view: Google is already in trouble in Europe and Australia for the exact same reasons. Publishers in France point out that Google needs them for its search to offer any value: 

“Without the news media, Google’s search engine would not perform as it does; it would be less relevant, and would carry only low-quality content. The main search algorithm would not work so well as it would be fed with crappy stuff.”

Point to note: Google is already facing two other antitrust investigations in India—into its ad business and Play Store.

How Google’s search tech works

First thing we have to recognise is that Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is essentially an advertising business. 

• Ads accounted for 80% of their revenue—which was an eye-watering total of $181.69 billion last year. 
• Of this, $147 billion came just from online ads—more than any company in the world. 
• Industry experts expect Google to control 27% of global online ad spending this year, including 57% for search ads and 10% of display.
• In the United States, Google made $4.7 billion off news content in 2018–almost as much as every news organization in America combined made from digital ads.

Now, the vast majority of news publishers are also highly dependent on ad revenue: Two-thirds of their total earnings comes from advertising alone and only a third is from subscriptions. 

So this is a fight over who gets to monetise the content created by news publishers—and who keeps the lion’s share. Over the years, Google has leveraged its position as the middleman to do just that—by introducing a number of features that allegedly optimise user convenience.

Zero click search: If you search for anything on Google today, a lot of the information is already available on the search results page. You don’t have to actually click on any site to get a lot of the information. Example: If you search for ‘Covid-19 deaths’, that page will pull information from New York Times, Wikipedia, and the World Health Organization—and look something like this: 

Data published in March showed that 65% of Google searches on mobiles and laptops ended without users clicking through to another domain. And Google doesn’t pay a dime for this content. See the problem? 

Point to note: Digital news sites also get a lot of their traffic from stuff like cricket scores, tournament lineups etc.—which is now displayed by Google the moment you search for a match.

Accelerated Mobile Pages: are basically a bare-bones version of a webpage that is stored on Google’s servers. They are designed to load fast—and they get rid of a lot of page-loading glitches that annoy users. Example: tiny fonts, huge images, error messages, no scrolling to the right because text doesn’t wrap etc. Sounds lovely, right? 

Except it locks news publishers into a Google-specified format—and spend time and money to do it:

“[P]ublishers were forced to build mirror-image websites using this format, with Google caching (storing) all articles in the AMP format and serving the content directly to mobile users, and that paywall options for such articles were restricted unless publishers rebuild their paywall options for AMP.”

If they refuse to do so, guess what? Your news article will never show up in that carousel at the top of the results page. 

Also this: Google now has all your traffic data: “The URL is destroyed because when you visit an AMP page you visit a cached URL. Share that URL and the people who visit it will also visit the Google cache, not the publisher's URL.”

And most importantly this: AMP content is stripped of most of the features that help you identify the source easily: 

“Anybody can cram an illegitimate idea into a web page and—so long as it's encoded as AMP content—it'll look like it's from a legit new organization endorsed by Google. Because everything in AMP looks the same. Content shown in Google's AMP view is stripped of all branding as if the content were from a legitimate news agency. There's a not so subtle message behind this lack of branding: it's that the source of information doesn't matter so long as Google got you there.”

AMP version 2.0: After a lot of criticism, Google announced that it will stop prioritising AMP pages—after everyone had already scrambled to create them. Now, it requires publishers to adhere to something called Core Web Vitals—a set of performance standards rather than a specific format. As The Register points out:

“Google is again using its dominance in the search business to force everyone to play on its terms. Whether that's a proprietary markup language or some arbitrary set of performance standards, the end result is the same. Google is a monopoly and it is using its monopoly position to force the rest of the web into doing what it wants.”

Big point to note: AMP is still the standard format since most publishers have already committed to it. 

Adding insult to injury: The company’s massive digital advertising arm has gobbled up most of the advertising market—and mopped up all the major ad sellers. It now dominates every part of that pipeline and everyone in it: publishers who sell ad space using its tools and companies who advertise their products through its network. So whether you want to buy or sell ads online, all roads lead to Google.

The Google defence

The company insists that the teeny bit of content it displays on the search page is part of the widely accepted ‘fair use’ doctrine—which allows limited reuse of copyrighted content. As we are doing right now in this explainer—by quoting facts and figures from various news outlets. 

But the bigger pushback is this:

“Google’s strongest argument—also the least known—is the transfer of value to the publishers, i.e.: when someone clicks on a ‘blue link’ of the search result page, they are sent to the publisher who will (hopefully) monetize the page with ads or various tools to convert the fly-by reader into a subscriber.”

In other words, without Google, it would be almost impossible for a person to find a news story—unless they were loyal subscribers or readers who go directly to the news website.

Point to note: In response to pressure in Europe and Australia—and faced with the threat of even stricter legislation—Google has cut deals with the biggest publishers to pay them for content. But it still leaves the smaller players in the lurch.

The bottomline: This entire explainer sums up why we are a paid news product. We do not want the fortunes of our company to be at the mercy of anyone—be it Google or Instagram or Facebook—except you.

Reading list

BloombergQuint has the details of the DNPA’s complaint. Business Insider and Finshots look at the perils of zero-click search. The Register has a very good critique of the AMP format and Core Web Vitals. The Guardian looks at how fake news and hate groups have gamed the Google algorithm. The Conversation argues that pressuring Google to pay up isn’t likely to solve the woes of the media industry. Monday Note offers a look at how Google is dealing with the same problem in France. We did an explainer back in October 2020 on the US government’s big lawsuit against Google—which offers a broader view of the company’s antitrust issues.