USA Today
Beware the Google behemoth, said Patrick Maines. Consumers love the search giant and its products, but they know little of Google’s dark side—one all too familiar to publishers, the movie industry, and the travel business. Those competitors have come to realize that “Google’s scale, business tactics, and aggressive lobbying amount to a distinct threat to their very existence.” Publishers, in particular, are right to worry. In the first half of 2012, for example, Google raked in more ad dollars than all American newspapers and magazines combined. And by favoring its own services and products in search results, Google has locked in those advertisers. In other sectors as well, it “uses its dominance in search to monetize, by corralling and aggregating (without permission) the content of others.” Most Americans don’t care—polls show they don’t have much confidence in the news media anyway. So “one might be tempted to dismiss the news media’s cannibalization by Google as something they had coming to them.” But Google’s “anti-competitive behavior” is killing resource-starved publishers struggling to support quality journalism “marked not by opinion but by objective news, investigative, and feature reporting.” It needs to be reined in before that’s all gone.
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