Google‘s ‘Experiment’ in Removing News Sites from Some Australians’ Search Results
By Theodore Totsis
(Theodore Totsis is a law student at the University of Wollongong.)
Executive Summary
An article recently published by James Purtill at ABC News puts the focus back on Google’s ongoing issue with the Australian Government concerning a mandatory News Media Bargaining Code.
According to that article, titled ‘Google ‘throwing its weight around’ by burying links to commercial news sites, experts say’, Google has made it harder to find links to some Australian news media sites, which the company has claimed to be ‘experiments’ affecting only 1% of its Australian consumer-base.
While these experiments are set to conclude in early February, figures in the academic, business and media communities are sceptical and have been quick to raise concerns about Google’s reasoning behind burying the content. This comes amidst the Australian Government’s proposed mandatory News Media Bargaining Code, which would apply to Google and other major technology companies.
Background
If like the other 19.2 million Australians, you use Google as your go-to search engine each month, then you may have noticed some news businesses and stories disappearing from your online search results.
2019 ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry
The 2019 ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry is a good source of context for this. On 4 December 2017, our current Prime Minister and then Treasurer, Scott Morrison, directed the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (‘ACCC’) to hold a public inquiry into the impact of, among other digital platforms, search engines on competition in media service markets; in particular, the impact of search engines such as Google on the supply of news content within Australia.
To fast-forward a little: on 26 July 2019, the ACCC released the final report of its Digital Platforms Inquiry (‘2019 Report’), revealing multiple key concerns. The primary concern was, and still is, the bargaining power imbalances between news media businesses and digital platforms such as Google; with the latter — of course — being the major holder of this power.
With Australian news media businesses so dependent on generating revenue through their online presence — facilitated by tech companies like Google — and Google gaining a large benefit from consumers using their platform to access these news media businesses, the ACCC believed it reasonable that Google at least enter fair negotiations with the businesses or, in other words, Google ought to pay them.
With that in mind and in the hopes of levelling the playing field: the ACCC recommended in the 2019 Report that Google supply to the Australian Communications and Media Authority a voluntary code of conduct governing their commercial relationships with news media businesses.
Mandatory News Media Bargaining Code
The talk of some sort of a code returned with the advent of COVID-19. With the transition into a largely virtual living and working environment, the online presence of news media businesses became inextricably linked with their ability to maintain a consumer base and generate revenue. On 20 April 2020, the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, announced with Paul Fletcher, Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts, that the ACCC had been directed to not only accelerate the development of a News Media Bargaining Code, but also make it mandatory. Per their joint media release, this was a result of news media businesses experiencing ‘a sharp decline in advertising revenue driven by the coronavirus’.
The Australian Government has continued the accelerated development of the mandatory News Media Bargaining Code. On 9 December 2020, Mr Frydenberg introduced a bill — the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020 (Cth) — into the House of Representatives to establish a mandatory bargaining code. The Bill is being studied by the Economics Legislation Committee, which will report by 12 February 2021.
Response of Google Australia
Given the threat posed by the Bill to Google’s business model, Google signalled its disapproval rather publicly. On 17 August 2020, Mel Silva, a senior executive of Google Australia and New Zealand, published an open letter, critical of the draft News Media Bargaining Code. The open letter described the Code as a ‘regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search’, further stating ‘the law is set up to give big media companies special treatment’. That same day, a media release by the ACCC in response to Google’s open letter criticised certain points in it as disinformation. Google has since released numerous updates on the matter. Most recently on 12 January this year, Mel Silva — now Managing Director of Google Australian and New Zealand — released another update critical of the government’s policy here.
While Google Australia’s response to the ACCC’s Code may suggest the two entities do not see eye-to-eye, that is not to say that Google does not care about news media businesses. Rather, over the past few years Google has demonstrated how helping these news media businesses both in Australia and abroad forms a part of its key business model and future. Their flagship for this has been the Google News Initiative (‘GNI’), which is Google’s effort to build much needed products for, collaborations with and programs to help news media businesses across the globe. Down under, the GNI’s ‘Journalism Emergency Relief Fund’ provided financial support to 97 Australian news media businesses experiencing a hard time due to COVID-19. Another project of the GNI included a 2019 partnership between Google and the Walkley Foundation, which in 2020 provided much needed digital skills training to journalists and news media businesses across Australia. As a blog post by Nic Hopkins — Lead of the Google News Lab (Australia and New Zealand) — recounted, the GNI has created multiple key projects and partnerships to the benefit of many news media businesses in Australia during the past two years.
Another recent initiative by Google to support news media businesses has been the Google News Showcase. This is a product Google introduced to Brazil and Germany on 1 October 2020 that comes packed with a $1 billion investment into the tech-giant’s partnerships with news media businesses. There are plans to introduce it into Australia, and Mel Silva has stated that this is Google’s testament to being ‘willing to invest in a strong future for the news industry’ in Australia.
However, the issue remains as to whether these initiatives actually mitigate the concerns raised by the ACCC in their 2019 Report. As such, we must ask ourselves whether we think Google is attempting to handle the press on their own terms.
Recent Experiments
Google’s recent burying of Australian news media businesses and these businesses’ content from Google Search results does not, on its face, appear as an attempt to handle the press on its own terms. However, the trend of Google’s negative commentary about the mandatory News Media Bargaining Code suggests that these new ‘experiments’ by Google may be connected to them preserving a private bargaining strategy.
I think the title of the recent ABC News article by James Purtill perhaps sums it up best — it reads:
Google “throwing its weight around” by burying links to some commercial news sites, experts say.
Results
So, what are the experts saying? Well, it has been clear for some time now that Google is a giant amongst digital platform operators; in particular, it has become the critical source for internet traffic to news media businesses. A 2019 Digital News Report by the University of Canberra found 43% of Australians using the Internet as their primary source of news, and 20% of Google’s Australian consumer-base using the platform’s search feature in order to locate said news media content. To put these 2019 figures into perspective, the Nielsen Digital Panel found that approximately 19.2 million Australians used the Google search feature per month in that year.
To reiterate, with, at that time, only a population of about 25 million nation-wide, it is undisputed that Google Search provided an incredibly sizable stream of internet traffic to news media businesses thus helping them to generate more subscribers and revenue. At the same time, these figures also indicate that a substantial amount of Google’s consumer base use the platform to search for news media businesses and original content.
While on that note, we know that a spokesperson claimed only about 1% of Google’s Australian consumer base were blocked from accessing such content — but how much is that actually? If we go by the previously mentioned 2019 figures of 19.2 million Australians using Google Search per month, then the tech-giant’s recent experiments are resulting in about 192,000 Australians being prevented from accessing certain news media businesses and content. That is a lot of us.
This, of course, comes at great cost to the ability of these Australians to access important updates to the nation’s news. As said by Dr Belinda Barnet, we are all in the middle of a pandemic and having such access to ‘timely accurate and fresh information’ is imperative. To take a pejorative view, Google has instead removed ‘news from the feeds of users to prove a point’ — and the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, believes that Google should focus on paying for the original content of these news media businesses, instead of blocking them.
So, what then is the point that Google is trying to prove — and should we be so critical of their actions?
Lessons
It may be theorised that these experiments are simply Google’s means to investigate the impact of a mandatory News Media Bargaining Code by demonstrating how, by businesses paying for their content to appear in Google Search, other content from other businesses may essentially become ‘buried’ or ‘disappear’ from news feeds entirely. Alternatively, Google may be searching for a way out — it’s important to recall here that these experiments are occurring between January and February, which is also the same period the ‘Bargaining Code Bill’ is being studied by the Economics Legislation Committe. It could simply be them gathering data in preparation for their case in response to that Committee’s report come February 12th.
Another point, and perhaps an unsavoury one, is that Google may be engaging in an aggressive campaign to demonstrate how easy it is for them to effectively ‘cut-off’ businesses and content from Google Search. Google’s experiments could thus be interpreted as aggressive PR tactics that echo its campaign in Spain in 2014. Personally, I don’t think that is what is happening here.
As has been demonstrated, the GNI as well as the Google News Showcase and plenty more projects and partnerships detail how Google wants to preserve a privately managed relationship between itself and the news media businesses that it negotiates with — and that isn’t exactly unfair. At the same time, it is not the case that these initatives indicate Google doesn’t not want to provide financial support to news media businesses, nor is there any suggestion by Google that they’re uninterested in continuing to work closely with such businesses and publish their future content.
What is clear, however, is that Google has not done itself any favours with the recent content burying ‘experiments’. Their CEO, Sundar Pichai, described the future of Google and news media businesses as ‘tied together’. However, preventing news content from being accessed by Australians does not secure a future for some smaller Aussie news media businesses — especially where their revenue is dependent on a sustained presence within Google Search. To top things off, this all comes at a time where businesses are still suffering and recovering from the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Google is still under fire overseas by the United States Department of Justice in three antitrust lawsuits; all of which were filed within the final few months of 2020.
At this stage, we may only be able to speculate as to what Google’s ‘thought process’ is here — but, it is evident that no good message is being sent from Google by burying our Australian news media businesses and their content.
Going forward, some businesses may just wait it out; others may bolster their self sufficiency through increased marketing and additional strategies to encourage consumers to access the businesses’ content directly — rather than, say, via the Google Search referral process.
Only time will tell and, while only about a month remains of these experiments, our nation’s news media businesses and their consumers may feel it slowing as so too does their delivery of news media content and critical updates.
