Microsoft & Google Spar Over Treatment Of News Outlets At Subcommittee Hearing

Microsoft and Google sparred Friday over their practices and treatment of news outlets in a battle between antitrust targets of past and present, reported CNBC.

In his written testimony for a hearing before the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust Friday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said Google has made journalism outlets dependent upon its vast array of services, including analytics and advertising tools, while profiting from access to their content. Smith said Google relies on content from these outlets to keep its users engaged, citing his own experience with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Smith said referral traffic from Google has real value to news outlets, but “monetizing that traffic has become increasingly difficult for news organizations because most of the profit has been squeezed out by Google.” He pointed to a steep decline in newspaper advertising revenue from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $14.3 billion in 2018, according to Pew Research. Over the same period, he said, Google’s ad revenue grew from $6.1 billion to $116 billion.

“This is not a coincidence,” he said.

Google swung back at Smith in a statement released ahead of the hearing, calling back to Microsoft’s period of antitrust scrutiny two decades ago.

“We respect Microsoft’s success and we compete hard with them in cloud computing, search, productivity apps, video conferencing, email and many other areas,” Google’s senior vice president of Global Affairs Kent Walker said in a blog post. “Unfortunately, as competition in these areas intensifies, they are reverting to their familiar playbook of attacking rivals and lobbying for regulations that benefit their own interests.”

“They are now making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival,” Walker wrote. “And their claims about our business and how we work with news publishers are just plain wrong.”

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