Google has welcomed the competition regulator’s inquiry into the impact of digital platforms on Australian publishers.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is investigating the impact of Google, content aggregators such as Apple News and social media platforms such as Facebook on the state of competition in media and advertising. The inquiry has taken on a new urgency in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s mining of Facebook data.
The inquiry was triggered by the concerns of the former senator Nick Xenophon that tech giants were damaging the viability of Australian media companies, which have lost print advertising dollars since the digital disruption.
The News Corp chief executive, Robert Thomson, has been highly critical of Google and Facebook, claiming they foster a “dysfunctional” and “debased” online environment that harms journalism.
The vice-president of news for Google, Richard Gingras, said on Tuesday that the company was talking to Australian authorities and publishers about improving revenue streams for local media and combatting “disinformation”.
“We recognise there are important changes going on,” Gingras said during a press briefing from New York. “So yes, it’s hugely important that various bodies [like the ACCC] look into these questions with greater knowledge and sophistication.”
Gingras said he was already working with Fairfax Media and, in a reference to attacks from News Corp, said he would much rather collaborate than “exchange criticisms in the press”.
Launching the $300m Google News Initiative to counter the effects of fake news and falling media advertising revenue, Gingras said the marketplace for information had changed – “no one uses the newspaper like we used to” – and that he was well aware of the impact of Google.
Last year the select committee on the future of public interest journalism heard that 3,000 jobs in Australian journalism had been lost in the past five years, from News Corp, Fairfax Media and the ABC among others.
Gingras deflected questions about Google’s dominance of digital advertising share and said Google sent millions of dollars of revenue back to publishers as well as traffic, and had recently launched products to drive subscription to newspapers.
Between 2011 and 2015 Australian newspaper and magazine publishers lost $1.5bn and $349m respectively in physical print advertising revenue but only gained $54m and $44m in digital advertising, according to the ACCC issues paper.
Google and Facebook now account for about three-quarters of total Australian online advertising expenditure.
Google also said it was improving its algorithms to more heavily weight results towards “authoritative sources” to combat fake news.
“One of the challenges of breaking news events is that they do attract bad actors,” Gingras said. “We will continue to enhance our ability to detect those situations and then, during a fast-breaking news event, shift our balance more towards authority.”
He said YouTube was also changing and would highlight its “Top News” shelf as a place to find relevant content from verified news sources.
The “Disinformation Lab” based at the Shorenstein Centre at Harvard is being funded by Google to monitor fake news during elections.
A spokeswoman for the ACCC said submissions to the inquiry close in two weeks but was unable to confirm whether Google had provided a submission yet.
