There has already passed the first week of the campaign in which the press publishers from all over Europe on the pages of their newspapers and magazines appeal to the authorities of the European Union to stop the monopoly of Google. The campaign will last for one more week. The reason for the campaign is the fact that the German Antitrust Office rejected the complaint of leading newspaper publishers who demanded from Google to share with them the profits from advertisements published along with fragments of their articles on Google News.
A group of German publishers, which included inter alia Axel Springer, Burda, WAZ and Muncher Merkur, in June this year sent to the State Antitrust Office a complaint against the Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Publishers wanted these American corporations to share the profits from the ads displayed along with text fragments from newspapers and magazines sites, which are aggregated to date by sites such as Google News. Specifically, it was about transferring of 11% of these revenues. However, the office announced that it would not look into the complaint.
Organizations of newspaper publishers across Europe began a campaign in which they point out Google’s quasi-monopolistic practices consisting primarily of promoting its sites and services in its own search engine. Publishers appeal to politicians of the European Union bodies not to conclude the settlement proposed by Google in this case.
