Publisher trade group backs U.S. Big Tech antitrust bills opposed by Apple

A group representing publishers such as News Corp and National Public Radio (NPR) wrote to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to back two bills targeting Big Tech, including one that would destroy the Apple App Store’s walled garden.
The United States Capitol Building
Reuters:

Digital Content Next, whose members also include the New York Times and Associated Press, wrote to Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, the top Republican, to back a bill aimed at reining in app stores owned by Apple and Alphabet’s Google.
“Platforms should be able to moderate their services to protect consumers, police IP theft and prevent security lapses. However, some dominant platforms have leveraged their privileged status as gatekeeper to unfairly compete in other markets,” Digital Content Next executives Jason Kint and Chris Pedigo wrote in the letter.
Publishers, whose news budgets have been squeezed as advertising dried up, have been battling search and advertising giant Google over what they see as the company’s unfair siphoning off of badly needed ad revenues.
Smartphone maker Apple, a target of the app store bill, has urged that it not be adopted because it supports practices such as “sideloading,” essentially using a non-Apple app store, which would mean that consumers lose privacy protections that Apple offers, among other concerns.

MacDailyNews Take: Leave Apple out of this.
There is one company that is really stifling competition: Google.
When one search engine has [91.9%] share of the worldwide market (and Google basically isn’t even used in China), there is far, far, far too much power concentrated in one company. The whole concept of the World Wide Web is destroyed when a sole gatekeeper basically controls what gets seen, read, and heard. It’s not open, it’s completely closed and controlled.
Publishers who want to be read, for example, spend an inordinate amount of time making sure they follow Google’s dictates, nebulously sussed from Google’s secret algorithm, formatting their sites, even writing their articles a certain way, including certain words they might not choose if allowed to write freely, simply to please Google’s algorithm.
If Google doesn’t like a site (imagine a site that believes Google’s Android is a stolen product and says so repeatedly), Google can hurt that site by, say, excluding that site from the News tab on Google (since 2009), so that the site is more difficult to find, hurting that site’s traffic and ability to generate revenue. (Is there a lawsuit there? Someday we might find out.)
Hopefully, lawmakers can come together to figure out a way to do something to remedy the horribly uncompetitive situation in internet search. Google is, and has been for years, a perfect example of why antitrust laws exist. — MacDailyNews, July 29, 2020
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