Google mocks News Corp over complaint with 'Murdoch accuses Google of eating his hamster' statement
Google has responded to a Newspaper group's complaint to the European Commission by satirising the headline style of The Sun newspaper.
In a statement Google said: "Phew what a scorcher! Murdoch accuses Google of eating his hamster" before referring to a blog post by founder Eric Schmidt, in which he wrote: "The allegations made by publishers have been extensively investigated by regulators in Europe and the US over more than seven years.
"To date no regulator has objected to Google giving people direct answers to their questions for the simple reason that it is better for users."
In its letter to the EU News Corp's CEO, Robert Thomson said: "Google must do more to ensure that rights are respected and that its powerful search platform is not abused to eliminate competition.”
“The shining vision of Google’s founders has been replaced by a cynical management, which offers advertisers impressively precise data about users and content usage, but has been a platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks."
The issues raised by Thomson are similar to those that have been raised by many creatives and publishers in the last few months.
Writing in The Drum, former creative head of Getty Images Lewis Blackwell called on the industry to: "end its silence" over what he said was "a situation where search engines currently facilitate theft in plain sight of us all, while the police are always somewhere else”.
Google has previously responded to accusations of encouraging piracy by pointing to its record in dealing with content reported to it. Figures show that in August alone the search company removed over 31m pages from 56,000 different domains, for alleged copyright infringement.
Speaking to The Drum Andrew Girdwood, director of media innovations at bigmouthmedia said: "In the fight against piracy Google may have gone too far to favour the big internationals. Now all it takes is for a clip of music or registered visuals from a large media owner to appear in an independent YouTube video and the whole video can be blocked."
"This leads to the YouTube user being unable to earn money on revenue share and is a nightmare scenario for the likes of computer game reviewers."
Girdwood told The Drum that in his view: " competition is important. A Google playing field which allows any publisher to secure high rankings and the associated audience through quality content and engagement is the one I want. I don’t want a search engine that prioritises sites just because they are owned by a large company."
When approached by The Drum Spokespeople for both News Corp and Google declined to comment further on the dispute.