Google could add another antitrust investigation to its stack. It was opened by the Spanish competition authority, CNMC. CNMC said today that it is concerned about potential anti-competitive practices related to the licensing of news content by local publishers.
A press release said it was investigating “a series of practices that may be involved in the abuse of Google’s dominant position over publishers of news publications and news agencies established in Spain.” [NB: We’ve translated the text from Spanish with machine translation].
“In particular, these practices may impose unfair commercial conditions on publishers of press publications and news agencies established in Spain to exploit content protected by intellectual property rights,” it added. “On the other hand, the behaviors investigated also include practices that constitute unfair competition practices that can distort free competition and affect the public interest.”
The Competition Authority has authorized the Spanish Reproduction Rights Center (a.k.a. Spanish Reproduction Rights Center or CEDRO).
We have reached out to everyone involved.
News licensing is an area where Google is already heavily sanctioned in Europe. In July 2021, French antitrust authorities fined the tech giant more than $500 million for reusing content in News that he violated an order to negotiate copyright fees with publishers. This follows the EU copyright reforms agreed in 2019 and expanded IP to snippets of news content, which platforms such as Google had to negotiate with publishers.
Spain will transpose EU reforms into national law in November 2021, paving the way for Google News to return to Spain.
Google’s news aggregation service was shut down in Spain in 2014. The country has passed a law aimed at forcing Google to pay bulk licensing fees for news snippets. With the EU copyright reform replacing the previous fee structure with the need to negotiate with individual publishers, Google News officially reopened in Spain in his June 2022.
At the same time, the company announced that it will launch a news showcase product domestically. Google News His Showcase product was spun up by the tech giant in Fall 2020. This is because legislators in Europe and elsewhere have focused on paying for the reuse of news content. This is to create a licensing vehicle that can be used in the looming bargaining with publishers.
It is not clear at this time whether the Spanish inquiry will focus on Google’s News Showcase license agreement, copyright fee negotiations, or both.
It remains to be seen what the Spanish investigation into Google’s news licensing practices will ultimately decide, but officials have been given up to 18 months to conduct an investigation, but at the preliminary information-gathering stage, “Signs of possible compromise” were found.
Meanwhile, German antitrust authorities have already pushed back Mountain View’s practices in this area after it began scrutinizing news-related bylaws in the summer of 2021. Big tech more than other European countries (targeted squarely at the digital giants with 2021 competition law changes) — Google has now offered a series of concessions on how to run its news showcase locally. rice field. Appears in general search results (his one trigger of antitrust concerns).
The News Showcase product offers the potential for increased visibility for participating publishers as it is an offer by Google to showcase participant content to users across multiple touchpoints. However, this could be a disadvantage for publishers that do not pay Google (i.e., given that Google continues to dominate the Internet search and content discovery market, Google’s general Internet search content is less visible).
Google has also tried to mix negotiations with publishers over news showcases with legally required negotiations over copyright fees under pan-EU reforms.
