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EU antitrust probe targets Google's spam policy

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Publishers claim Google's policy impacts their revenue

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Investigation could lead to significant fines for Google

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Alphabet's Google

was hit with an EU antitrust investigation into its spam policy

on Thursday following complaints from publishers who say it has

hurt their revenues, putting the U.S. tech giant at risk of yet

another hefty fine.

Google began cracking down against companies gaming its

search algorithm to push up rankings for other sites in March

last year.

Its site reputation abuse policy targets the practice of

publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse

search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking

signals, commonly referred to as parasite SEO.

The European Commission said its monitoring indicated that

Google is demoting news media and other publishers' websites and

content in Google search results when those websites include

content from commercial partners.

It said Google's policy appears to directly impact a common

and legitimate way for publishers to monetise their websites and

content.

"We are concerned that Google's policies do not allow news

publishers to be treated in a fair, reasonable and

non-discriminatory manner in its search results," EU antitrust

chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement.

"We will investigate to ensure that news publishers are not

losing out on important revenues at a difficult time for the

industry, and to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets

Act (DMA)," she said.

TECH GIANT CALLS EU INVESTIGATION 'MISGUIDED'

Google pushed back against the EU competition enforcer,

saying the EU move risks degrading the quality of search

results.

"The investigation announced today into our anti-spam

efforts is misguided and risks harming millions of European

users," Pandu Nayak, chief scientist at Google Search, wrote in

a blog post.

"And the investigation is without merit: a German court has

already dismissed a similar claim, ruling that our anti-spam

policy was valid, reasonable, and applied consistently," he

said.

He said Google's anti-spam policy helps level the playing

field to thwart websites from using deceptive tactics to outrank

websites competing on the merits with their own content.

German media company ActMeraki in April complained to the

Commission, saying that Google's spam policy penalises websites.

The European Publishers Council, the European Newspaper

Publishers Association and the European Magazine Media

Association also have voiced similar grievances.

The EU investigation is under the DMA which seeks to rein in

the power of Big Tech where violations can cost companies as

much as 10% of their global annual sales.