When Google hides news, society is left with junk, experts say

Experiments in Australia highlight firm’s control of reliable information

Early in January, the Guardian Australia published alarming reports of a bushfire ravaging vast areas of the southern continent.

Three fires moving rapidly across New South Wales and Victoria had merged to create one gigantic “megablaze,” the news outlet reported, forcing midnight evacuations and the deployment of thousands of firefighters across the region.

Some Australians who rely on Google’s search engine for news might have missed this.

At the time of the bushfires, the multinational technology company was “running a few experiments” that removed some media sites from its search results, it told the Guardian a few days later.

The company told the newspaper the experiments will continue until early February.

These experiments affect roughly one per cent of Google Search users in Australia — which, given the large market share of the company and the high number of Australians who rely on the search engine, could amount to 160,000 people, the Guardian estimated.

The company’s Google News site gets hundreds of millions of monthly visitors to view the content gathered from nearly 20,000 publishers around the world.

But recent clashes between Google and governments seeking to have it pay for news content have highlighted the expansive power the multinational technology company wields.

“If they can hide mainstream media, then you’re going to be left with the junk and misinformation that hurts society,” said Daniel Tsai, a teacher at Ryerson University and former senior policy adviser for the government of Canada.

(Torstar, the company that owns the Peterborough Examiner, is campaigning for the Canadian government to adopt measures that would require tech companies like Google and Facebook to pay for the news content they use.)

Tsai, who has penned columns criticizing Google in the Toronto Star, says its users have developed an overreliance on the search engine that makes it difficult to detach from typical internet use.

“People implicitly trust Google’s algorithms,” he said. “They don’t believe it could be doing harm.”

In recent weeks, the company has threatened to pull its search engine from Australia, forcing the country to find another tech company to fill the void. With 95 per cent market share, Google has a near monopoly on search engines, says Tsai. Microsoft Bing, technically a competitor, holds just over three per cent.

Google has sought to downplay the significance of its experiments affecting Australian users, noting that it conducts “tens of thousands” of experiments in Google Search annually. In an email to the Star, Google spokesperson Lauren Skelly said the experiments did not prevent Australians from reaching news sources.

“These are tiny experiments, impacting only a very small per cent of users, so the vast majority of users are totally unaffected,” Skelly said. “Even users affected by the experiments can continue to access the news websites, for example they can go to the publishers’ websites directly.”

Following Australia’s lead, Ottawa has also been developing legislative changes that are anticipated to make Google, as well as other tech giants including Facebook, pay for news content.

John Hinds, CEO of News Media Canada, a lobby group that represents media companies in Canada, including Torstar, says the company’s ability to determine what news users see poses a threat to democracy.

“If there’s no real news there, then it’s all going to be fake news — and that only exacerbates the problem,” Hinds said.

In September 2020, News Media Canada published a report that said Google and Facebook have an “effective duopoly in the market for digital ads” in Canada, having reaped $7.5 billion in Canadian digital ad revenue in 2019, up from a combined $2.8 billion in 2014.

Emily Laidlaw, a law professor at the University of Calgary researching cybersecurity and internet regulation, says the company has a long history of adversarial negotiations with countries over copyright and competition concerns.

Since 2010, the European Union has launched three antitrust investigations into the company for violating the union’s competition laws, resulting in formal charges and guilty verdicts.

The union also released strict new copyright rules in 2019 requiring Google to pay publishers for using snippets of their content.

“More people pay attention to what Google does with its power,” Laidlaw said. “So I think there might be more pushback against them now.”