Google is in the middle of a battle with the German Magazine Publishers association, part of a larger battle over Google’s excerpting of content. Magazine publishers, already fighting for their financial lives, want to be paid for excerpted content. Legal firm CMS Hasche Sigle represents the German Magazine Publishers. That’s background. Here’s the issue.
From the New York Times:
Andreas Schwab, a German member of the European Parliament, has been making headlines in the last week after drafting a resolution that calls for the breakup of Google.
But Mr. Schwab is not just a legislator, he is also “of counsel” at the German law firm CMS Hasche Sigle, which has represented some of the German publishing interests that have been most eager to declaw Google. He earns roughly $15,000 to $75,000 annually from the firm, according to a disclosure filing. The firm’s website lists his expertise as competition policy.
There’s some smoke here. The question is, is there also fire? Not clear.
Potential conflicts like working at a law firm are barred by the United States Congress, though permitted in some American state legislatures. European law has no prohibition on holding a second job at a law firm, though it does require disclosure of the relationship.
In an email, Mr. Schwab said he had not discussed his resolution with the law firm and called it “a purely political issue.”
“All transparency rules are fully respected,” he said, adding that many of his colleagues had to weigh in on the resolution. “You can be sure that the text of this resolution” is “based on a neutral assessment of the facts.”
No doubt this piece came from Google whistle blower.
I am ashamed of the Leistungsschutzrecht-bullshit that is happening in Germany.
Publishers demanded a law that forces news aggregators to pay a fee, in other words they got a Lex Google that would force Google to pay for the snippets from Google News and the search results.
Google reacted in the expected way and started to display only the headlines of articles that are published by publishers that haven’t granted Google a permission to use their content in Google News.
What happened? The publishers accuse Google of abusing their monopoly on everything “Internet” by displaying only the headlines instead of snippets and want to force Google to display full snippets -> which would force Google to pay the publishers.
‘ties to other side’ is weird… Dave. Other side of what? Google’s advertising focus that seeks to track & log all your online activities … or Google’s mobile focus that opens users to malicious activities via their devices… or Google’s creepy insistence that neither peoples’ privacy nor any country’s laws should stand in the way of what ever they feel like doing… Times story notes that publishers have some beef with Google over something, but who doesn’t.
Google can still be evil even if it’s forced to back off a bit. I hope the EU bill succeeds.
The fact Amazon was almost entirely behind the genesis of the iBook lawsuit against publishers and Apple sure didn’t slow down the US DoJ. Don’t expect genesis here in the same vein to stop or slow down an EU suite
BTW: breaking up Google in this way probably would be long term good for the Internet. Right now Google effectively does the equivalent of product dumping, a practice that is normally illegal.
It’s really hard to compete with free services subsidized by Search ads. That puts other companies that want to offer services here and there more or less on their heels or out of business.
If separated from Search, those other business would have to compete on their own merits; that would level the playing field for everyone else.
Good reply – I was about to post likewise myself.
Unrelated on the matter of “fire & smoke”: the purpose of any disclosure is transparency. So you’ve got someone running around a fire yelling at everyone “my fire – this is where my smoke comes from – please take note”.
I wonder why Google did not get a fraction of the attention in the US when they unlawfully intruded the private communications of corporations and individuals in Europe, recorded and retained intercepted WiFi data transmissions until a court order stopped that practice. Or when they bypassed browser privacy settings to keep on prying on your intimate data.
I think Google per se is an awesome company and with tighter and better defined boundaries they can become even more awesome instead of increasingly more robber baron.