Dissatisfied with unfair conditions in digital advertising, the Indian Association of Digital News Publishers filed a monopoly charge against Google with the Competition Dominance of India's competition regulator, the CCI.
After reviewing the evidence, the CCI preliminarily determined that Google's actions violated the abuse of dominance provisions in local competition laws. The CCI will appoint the Director General to further investigate the case and submit an investigation report within 60 days.
According to evidence submitted by the Publishers Association, two-thirds of the revenue of indian news publishers currently comes from advertising and only one-third from reader subscriptions. More than 50% of website traffic, which is closely related to advertising revenue, is contributed by online search engines. A series of statistical reports provided by the Publishers Association show that Google dominates the two related markets mentioned above, the Indian search engine market and the online advertising services market.
The Publishers Association believes that the imbalance in market position has led to an imbalance in the bargaining power of both parties. News sites receive only 51% of the advertising costs paid by advertisers and do not have access to any data on advertising revenue earned through the website.
At the same time, much of the news site's traffic relies on Google, which makes it impossible for news publishers to sever their business relationship with Google. Google was able to unilaterally set the terms of the agreement for the sharing of advertising revenue, and news publishers had no choice but to accept the terms.
Because of Google's strong position and information asymmetry, news publishers are unable to optimize their advertising revenue.
In addition, the Publishers Association said Google also unilaterally decided not to pay for citing titles, authors, thumbnails and article fragments in search results. The purpose of referencing related fragments is to provide users with content directivity so that users can judge the relevance of news content to query content.
In other words, the Publishers Association is unhappy that content produced by news publishers creates an environment for Google to interact with advertisers, yet Google gets more out of it.
After the publishers association filed the allegations, the CCI ordered an investigation into Google on Jan. 7 with the aim of ensuring it had not abused its dominance. The CCI also mentioned the news payment negotiations with Google in Australia, France, the European Union and other regions in the relevant documents. In November 2021, Google announced a five-year cooperation agreement with Agence France-Presse on a pay-for-news partnership.
Google has not responded to the CCI's investigation. According to Nandu reporters, Google has previously faced a policy investigation by the CCI on its app store, Google Play, mainly for the high commission policy in digital product transactions.
Written by: Nandu reporter Huang Huishi
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