Italian newspapers ask competition watchdog to investigate Google News

Google News publishes headlines and snippets of text produced by newspapers who allow it to use their material. Publishers can easily stop Google from using material published on their newspaper websites.

Publishers, though, have taken legal action against Google in the past over the use of their news stories. The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) told the New York Times that it objected to a lack of transparency about how Google ranks stories and items, preventing publishers from accurately honing their content to win higher rankings and advertising revenue.

“Publishers provide much of the content on the Internet, but they get nearly nothing for it,” FIEG president Carlo Malinconico told the paper. “This is not fair, in our opinion. Our feeling is we lose more than we gain.”

Google, though, has said that any publisher unhappy with being included on Google News can easily opt out. "As we explained to the FIEG when we met them earlier this year, Google News has over 25,000 sources from around the world," said a blog post published by Google News product manager Josh Cohen. "All of these news providers - like any website publisher - are in complete control when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google services."

"So if a news publisher doesn’t want to be found on Google.com, Google.it or any other reputable search engines, it can prevent indexation automatically via a universally accepted Internet standard called robots.txt," said Cohen.

The FIEG told the New York Times that the price of withdrawing was too high, that if newspapers took their material off Google News they would also have to take it off Google's search engine, a disastrous move for any organisation seeking casual internet visitors.

Google said that this is not true. "One … option is for a publisher to continue to appear in Google web search, but not in Google News. In that case, all they need to do is contact us to be removed. In fact, we met with several Italian publishers and representatives of FIEG just this summer to explain these options," said Cohen.

"We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we've made it easy to opt out of our services. However, when it comes to Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for removal," he said.

Publishers in Belgium did win a legal case against Google over its News service. Representative body Copiepresse won a case in which it said that caches of its members' content broke copyright law.

It later came to a deal with Google that allowed member material to appear in Google searches but not in the News service.

Competition regulators visited Google Italy's offices last week in connection with the claims, said reports.