The News/Media Alliance submitted comments on May 19 commending the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for investigating technology platforms’ implementation of “opaque or unpredictable” internal procedures to restrict users’ access with little ability to mitigate the related harm. The FTC formally requested comments to understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of the users’ speech or their affiliations. The FTC’s notice states that these practices by technology platforms “may have resulted from a lack of competition or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct.”
In its comments, the Alliance highlights the significant harms from Google’s changes to its site reputation abuse policy that undermines publishers’ ability to monetize their content on their own sites to compete with Google, and encourages the FTC to consider options to stop Google’s attempts to unilaterally de-rank and delist publishers’ webpages and products that benefit local business, consumers, and community newspapers for Google’s advantage.
The Alliance emphasized that Google uses its dominant market position to make itself an arbiter of acceptable content to degrade, demonetize, and de-rank competitor websites based on opaque criteria. The Alliance’s comments further note that at the same time Google de-ranks/delists competitor’s properties, Google promotes its own advertising business, using its own “AI Overviews” to display promotional codes and even promoted its new coupons offering to advertisers, which works as a direct competitor to publishers. The Alliance cautioned that without external incentives, Google is unlikely to stop the threat it poses to publishers and other website operators, large and small.
