News Corp calls for break up of Google
Australia’s competition watchdog is examining the dominance of technology platforms
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has called on Australia’s competition watchdog to break-up Google, arguing the US company’s dominance of online search and advertising technologies is damaging consumers, advertisers and news publishers.
The media group’s Australian division said in a submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry on Tuesday that it should recommend to Canberra that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, be forced to divest its search function from the rest of its business units.
“Google leverages its market power in both general search services and ad tech services to the detriment of consumers, advertisers and news publishers. To remedy these harms, Google could either sell Google Search, or retain Google Search and divest the rest of its businesses to a third party,” said News Corp.
The proposed remedy is one of a series of recommendations made by News Corp, which has been lobbying governments across the world to take tougher regulatory action against digital giants such as Google and Facebook.
US and UK lawmakers are already targeting Facebook over its sharing of personal data, and last year the EU fined Google a record €4.3bn for abusing the dominant position of its Android mobile phone operating system. Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged to break up technology giants Facebook, Google and Amazon if she is elected president next year.
The ACCC inquiry is one of the world’s first studies of the impact of digital platforms on the advertising and news industries, and the tech industry fears it could influence other jurisdictions to step up scrutiny. A preliminary report in December proposed reforms to the news referral, advertising and social media markets, which the technology industry warns would hurt competition, consumers and innovation. But it stopped short of recommending divestment.