Just a few days after News Corp CEO Robert Thomson wrote a strongly worded letter to Joaquin Almunia, the European commissioner for competition, alleging Google to be exploiting its dominance in the field, the tech giant’s Head of Global Communications Rachel Whetstone has replied to the accusations in an official blog post.
The post was titled ‘Dear Rupert’ referring to Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp and its content focused on the efforts of the company to stop piracy.
Whetstone highlighted the fact that Google has spent tens of millions of dollars on its battle against piracy in YouTube. She also said that the company has removed more than 222 million web pages from search results last year due to copyrights infringement. Also, the company has responded to copyright infringement complaints in an average of six hours in the past.
In response to the Robert Thomson’s accusation that Google’s exploiting its dominant market position and that it has thus become the gatekeeper to the Web, Whetstone said that Google changes the search algorithms more than 500 times a year and that is not for stifling competition but to provide relevant content to users.
She also wrote that Google has done more than any other company to fight piracy. Whetstone noted that the search engine drives more than 10 billion clicks per month to over 60,000 publishers with billions of dollars involved in advertising on these sites.
For the Thomson’s statement that Google’s power in the field makes it hard for the users to “access information independently and meaningfully,” Whetstone said that there is direct traffic to websites and that there are new ways to access information like users also visit websites on mobile devices.
The European Commission has opened the 4-year-old probe on antitrust issue again and Almunia said that she wished to settle the case before her 5 year term is over but, however, she can’t as her term gets over next month. It remains to be seen what her successor Margrethe Vestager, former Danish economy minister will decide.
