“I think there’s a public policy problem. It’s hard enough to be in the journalism business without Google coming and sucking the air out of it,” said Professor Ben Edelman, an expert in internet architecture and how it affects business opportunities and a consultant for various companies such as Microsoft, the New York Times, the National Football League and Wells Fargo.
Mr. Edelman, who was in Ottawa last week to speak to government officials about online competition issues, told The Hill Times that Google’s practices are undermining competition and the news industry as it relates to advertisers.
“They’ll send you to one news site to read one article, earning the website $1.25 when the user does it 1,000 times and then you’re supposed to come back to Google to run another web search and get another article. Whereas in the publisher’s worldview, you come and read 10 articles. That’s how I read the New York Times. I read 10 articles a day. Maybe I read more than that. And that’s much more valuable to the news publisher to establish some long term relationship with the consumer, who comes there directly, reads multiple articles, sees the expensive high priced ads on the front page of NewYorkTimes.com,” he said. “If there’s a decision to be made, should we do what’s good for Google, or what’s good for the news business? I favour the news business on that one every time.”
In other words, while news publications only have the potential to bring in online advertising revenue for the articles they produce, a search engine like Google could collect ad revenue for articles produced by every news publication in the country, and they can do so at a lower cost making them more appealing to advertisers.
Last year Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart set new guidelines for online behavioural advertisers and said when advertisers use that method to track users’ online behaviour to deliver targeted ads, it can sometimes be “downright creepy.” Mr. Edelman agreed that it is “creepy” but said there needs to be a balance especially when it comes to online advertising for media. “It can definitely reveal information that consumers do not expect to reveal. You let someone sit down at your computer. You don’t think they’re able to see what you’ve been doing … but then the advertiser goes and tells them,” he said. “I’m sympathetic to the problem, because I want to help the news publishers stay afloat and if we don’t allow this, it will be one more nail in the [news] coffin. The privacy implications are troubling.”
Mr. Edelman, a member of the Massachusetts bar who earned a PhD and a law degree from Harvard, said there should be more competition in the online search engine field. “In particular Google shouldn’t be allowed to bully their competitors and would-be competitors that way and we should be doing what we can to make sure that a rich competitive marketplace in search exists,” he said, noting that advertisers pay Google “tens of billions of dollars a year.”
He said that governments should be investigating these competition issues. “There’s a strong case to be brought against Google for competition law violations, for undermining competitors, for tricking advertisers into overpaying, for bundling services,” he said. “The Australian Consumer Protection Commission brought a case against Google for deceptive advertising. You ask for one company and Google shows an ad for the competitor because the competitor paid more. Australia sued Google for that and Google has to pay some money and has to stop doing it in Australia. But they’re going to keep on doing it everywhere else, unless some other regulators step up for the same protections for their countries.”
In response to the European Commission’s investigation into Google’s practices there, the Wall Street Journal argued regulating Google’s search functions is not necessarily a good thing for consumers. “Tying down Google’s search functions in a bid to satisfy Brussels won’t necessarily improve the user experience. Search has come a long way in the past decade, but it’s still often frustrating and tedious,” an editorial from May said. “That suggests there’s plenty of room for improvement and competition. Making Google less useful to make competitors happy won’t make surfing the Web any better for consumers.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
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