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Il presidente di Fieg Malinconico nel recente intervento sul WSJ di Valentin Petkantchin: Antitrust al Dente for Google in Europe

Don’t Cook the Newspapers’ Goose

The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) lodged, last July, a complaint against Google’s abuse of dominant position. That complaint and the decision by the Italian Antitrust Authority to pursue the matter have raised a lot of interest and some concern (see Valentin Petkantchin’s “Antitrust al Dente for Google in Europe,” Nov. 5).

Italians don’t mind being associated with pasta, but there is much more at issue here. We are talking about the staple of modern democratic societies: news and informed analysis. These cost a lot and are at risk of being thinned out in the digital world, where premium content publishers compete not only with other content producers, but with totally different businesses and products—including some that thrive on distributing and aggregating the publishers’ own content and on exploiting the relationship between publishers and their customers.

Mr. Petkantchin argues that “forcing the hand of a business partner has nothing to do with free competition.” Of course it doesn’t. But that it is not what the Italian publishers are doing. They are instead trying to address an unbalanced situation in which value created by publishers is reaped by subjects who neither invent nor produce it.

Publishers know perfectly well that it is up to them to exploit advertising spurred by content that they produce, but this is exactly what they are prevented from doing by those who regulate the search engine while selling advertising.

Mr. Petkantchin also argues that real competition exists in the search engine market. Unfortunately that is not the case. It is not just an extravagance of the “European” way of thinking about competition to state that a market share of over 80% (and close to 90%) is a dominant position, while the other players (10 at least, by the author’s own count) have very fragmented shares. We agree that these figures are not carved in stone, but for change to happen the market should be contestable. It is not enough to note that the other players would be willing to erode Google’s share. It must be examined whether there are the conditions for such an erosion. It is furthermore important to note that at issue in this case is not the dominant position, but its abuse, which is summed up by the attitude, “Go by our rules, or jump overboard.”

Newspaper publishers are not alone in complaining about Google. Fedoweb, the Italian Federation of Online Publishers, lodged a complaint with the Antitrust Authority about Google’s AdPlanner. This is an ad platform intended to compete with the advertising activities of the publishers by combining data about users’ behavior on the publishers’ own sites, collected through Search, AdWords and AdSense services with data coming from Analytics, YouTube and Toolbar. Internet content providers cannot prevent Google from assembling and analyzing data about the interaction of their content with their users—unless they are ready to shut themselves out of Google’s Search.

We believe that our questions deserve an objective answer. We like our pasta to be al dente. But please, let us not overcook these issues!

Carlo Malinconico Castriota Scanderbeg

President
Italtian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG)
Rome