More Trouble For Google In India: CCI Orders Probe Over News Aggregation Dominance

In mounting troubles for Google, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Friday (October 7) ordered another probe into the tech giant over alleged abuse of dominance in the news aggregator space.

The order came in response to a complaint filed by New Delhi-based News Broadcasters and Digital Association (NBDA) against Alphabet, Google LLC, Google India, Google Ireland and Google Asia Pacific.

The CCI said that the probe will be clubbed with two other investigations into Google over similar claims. The competition watchdog has directed the Director General (DG) to submit a consolidated investigation report in the matter. 

Citing Google’s unfair revenue sharing agreement with digital news portals, the NBDA argued that its members are forced to provide their news content to Google to rank higher on Google search pages. 

The broadcaster body alleged that Google freerides on the content of its members without giving them adequate compensation. The petition also claimed that Google exploited its near-total monopoly in the search engine space to build services such as Google News, Google Discover and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The NBDA said that while the tech giant incorporates news content from its members, the revenue distributed by Google to news publishers does not compensate for the real contribution made by these portals.

The NBDA claims to have 25 broadcasters as its members including media conglomerates such as Network18, NDTV, TV Today Network, among others. 

Google Facing Multiple Probes 

This is not the first time that Google is in the dock for its alleged abuse of dominance in the news aggregation space. 

In January this year, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) approached the CCI over Google’s monopolistic position in the search market as well as in the advertising intermediation. In its petition, the DNPA alleged that Google unilaterally decides the terms and the amount to be paid to the publishers for the content created by them. 

Subsequently, the competition watchdog launched a probe into Google over the matter. 

Close on the heels of that, the Indian Newspapers Society (INS) also filed a similar plea before the CCI in March. The INS’ complaint was then clubbed together with the previous plea filed by the DNPA. 

With the latest order, the NBDA has become the third party to the probe pertaining to allegations into the search engine giant. 

Such was the clamour around the issue that even Minister of State (MoS) for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar recently said that the government is looking at making big tech players pay a share of their revenues to Indian newspapers and news portals for using the latter’s original content.

The increasing smartphone and internet penetration in the country has seen big tech giants such as Google enter a myriad of avenues including news aggregation space. While exact numbers are not available, a big chunk of internet users search and read news online. While the search engine uses offerings such as Google News to attract eyeballs and generate ad revenue, it largely keeps original content producers out of the loop in terms of targeted ad data and revenue generation.

Google is under CCI’s scrutiny in a slew of other cases including dominance in the operating system market, in-app billing policy on the Play Store, and its popular payments service Google Pay. 

It was reported last month that the CCI could soon announce its verdict in the case involving Google’s contentious Play Store policy which has seen many developers and civil society organisations rally behind the cause.