The owner of UK tabloid The Daily Mail is suing Google, claiming that it is penalizing the Mail's search engine placement for using non-Google ad tech.
Daily Mail editor emeritus Peter Wright told the BBC's Today programme that the search engine's alleged actions were "anti-competitive".
He suggested that the Daily Mail's search visibility dropped after using online advertising techniques "which were allowing us to divert advertising traffic away from Google to other ad exchanges, which paid better prices – and this was their punishment".
It being The Daily Mail will turn a lot of us off, especially since it's whining about the poor performance of Piers Morgan content—a hilarious tell that suggests the world's largest media website still doesn't quite realize the horrible truth about the internet.
it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets. That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist.
Emphasis mine.
That said, Google is already widely charged with abusing monopoly power to squash competition. The Daily Mail is, essentially, joining a bandwagon already packed with dozens of government agencies, tech companies and other media outlets. And it's bringing deep pockets to the fight.
It'd be nice to see Google in discovery and made to explain the anticompetitive ad/search shenanigans being alleged. Google insists it keeps its ad and search arms independent (and it's even held that adding Google ad tech to your site can harm Google search result placements) but where there's a blackened smoking rend in the earth where healthy competition used to be, there's fire.
