Google Is Buying Media Friends

[Commentary] Remember how Google used to profess an aversion to being evil, back when it was the coming Internet company? Well, the "Digital News Partnership" it announced with eight European publishers is pretty evil -- a transparent attempt to buy political influence. European publishers have long fought Google for spreading their copyrighted information free of charge through its Google News service and search engine. The US company has done a good job of fighting them off by market means: Cutting the complainers out of Google News and its search index. More often than not, they've come crawling back, begging to be reinstated.

Recently, however, the balance of forces appeared to tip against Google, when the European Commission decided to pursue an antitrust case against it for allegedly stifling competition by promoting its own comparison shopping service. This followed attacks on the US company from various European capitals, especially Berlin, on matters ranging from customer privacy to tax avoidance. Google's executives must have wondered if their unfriendliness toward politically influential publishers might have contributed to the political headwinds it suddenly faced in Europe. Obviously, news organizations have to develop new business models: Journalism is increasingly hard to monetize. They have the brains, however, to figure these things out for themselves. Google is big and sells a lot of ads, but that doesn't mean it knows more about the news business than publishers do, after more than two decades of technological revolution. Those European news organizations that say "thanks, but no thanks" to the Digital News Initiative won't have to explain themselves to their readers, many of whom already suspect Google of being too close to the US government. They can just say they want to avoid any conflict of interest when writing about the search giant and its regulatory tribulations. Maybe it's Google that needs some remedial training in journalism.