What's the news: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) on October 6 said that it has received a complaint against Google's news aggregation practices from the News Broadcasters & Digital Association (NBDA) and has decided to investigate the case along with similar complaints filed by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and The Indian Newspaper Society. NBDA counts BBC, CNBC, IndiaToday, NDTV, BloombergQuint, TimesNow, CNN News18, and ETNow, among its members. Why does this matter: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter aggregate news from publishers’ websites and showcase them to users, resulting in users not having to visit the source of the news. Because of this news publishers are deprived of ad revenue, which is the primary source of revenue for most publishers. For this reason, news companies around the world have approached regulators and some countries like Australia, France, and Spain have mandated that tech companies pay news publishers for their content, and other countries like Canada and New Zealand are exploring similar legislation. Apart from the CCI investigation, the Indian government is also looking to frame regulations to make tech companies pay Indian news organisations a share of their revenue. What are the main allegations against Google: In the latest complaint, the News Broadcasters & Digital Association has alleged the following: Forcing publishers to provide news: News publishers are forced to provide news content to Google in order to be ranked higher on the search results page. "Thus, Google free rides on the content of the members of Informant without giving them adequate compensation." Exploiting publishers for its…
