The US online giant Google has allayed the Bundeskartellamt’s concerns about its Google News Showcase news service by making concessions. The Bonn competition authority announced on Wednesday that the proceedings against the search engine operator for the online news service had been completed. “We were concerned that comparable offers from other providers would be crowded out by Google News Showcase and that participating publishers would be unreasonably disadvantaged by Google,” said Andreas Mundt, President of the Cartel Office. “Google has responded to our concerns and made significant adjustments to the benefit of publishers.”
The collecting society Corint Media welcomed the conclusion of the investigation. “Google News Showcase was and is an attempt by Google to circumvent the legal rights of press publishers,” explained the two managing directors Markus Runde and Christoph Schwennicke. “This is now much more difficult.” However, the cartel office has not fully exhausted the possibilities of the new competition law.
In 2021, the competition authorities received new powers from the legislature to secure competition in the internet economy. The Cartel Office can then more easily determine a dominant position of companies and intervene to prohibit certain types of behavior. In the case of the US giant Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, on the basis of the new powers at the beginning of the year, the office had certified the group’s outstanding cross-market importance and thus opened the way to being able to prohibit anti-competitive practices in a second step. Google News Showcase is a news service from Google that gives publishers the opportunity to display publisher content within the framework set by Google. According to the Cartel Office, the content made available there is not selected based on Google’s mechanisms, but rather by the publishers themselves and influenced in their presentation.
Mundt said Google dropped plans to integrate Showcase with general Google search during the process. “A publisher’s participation or non-participation in Showcase will continue to be irrelevant for the ranking of search results.” Google has also changed its contract practice in such a way that it is not made more difficult for publishers to assert their general press ancillary copyright. “It also ensures that more publishers will be able to participate in Google News Showcase in the future.” When the Federal Cartel Office intervened, the US group made it clear that the Showcase partners would still be able to have their ancillary copyright collectively exercised by a collecting society. Google will implement further measures in the coming weeks. This is intended to provide even clearer information about the essential framework conditions of Showcase.