Today is the deadline for comment on the UK CMA’s strategic market status investigation into Google’s search services and, as press publishers, we have serious skin in the game. It’s a daunting task for the regulator, but the obvious careful thought and consideration that has gone into the investigation is impressive.
We see this as a golden opportunity to address the abusive practices that result in the interdependence and toxicity that define the Google/press publisher relationship. We hope and expect that the CMA will indeed deem Google to have Strategic Market Status and we urge the regulator to impose its first set of conduct requirements at the same time as its designation decision. The EPC raises some specific concerns about the integration of AI Overviews into their dominant search engine. Press publishers are hugely disadvantaged by the status quo which already provides Google with the ability to monetise directly and indirectly its services built on top of content developed by publishers, and at the expense of publishers generating revenues from this content. Independent, professional journalism is a cornerstone of democratic society and obvious anticompetitive practices, including Google’s burgeoning use of AI that undermine the independent editorial media must be dealt with urgently.
Under the digital markets competition regime, the CMA may designate firms with Strategic Market Status in relation to a particular digital activity. If designated, the CMA could impose conduct requirements or introduce pro-competition interventions to achieve positive outcomes for UK consumers and businesses. For any business to be able to be designated with strategic market status it must be found to have:
Substantial and entrenched market power in a digital activity linked to the United Kingdom
A position of strategic significance
Global turnover of more than £25 billion or UK turnover of more than £1 billion
Supporting the CMA’s findings
Concerns around Google’s abusive practices are not new, but they have been so far unaddressed.
We agree with the CMA on the need to:
address weak competition and barriers to entry and innovation in search.
prevent leveraging market power and ensuring open markets.
protect users against exploitative conduct.
give consumers more control over their data.
ensure search rankings are non-discriminatory.
introduce requirements to ensure fair terms (including payment terms) for use of publisher content.
The integration of AI into Google’s dominant search engine deserves special mention. Google’s AI Overviews—launched in the UK in 2024—combine LLM-generated content with real-time data scraped from the web, including from publishers without consent. These AI summaries push original sources further down search results, syphoning off traffic and revenue while depriving publishers of audience-building opportunities.
There is an illusion of choice as while publishers could technically block Google’s web crawler, doing so would effectively remove them from Google’s search ecosystem—an impossible trade-off that reinforces Google’s gatekeeper power.
Action is urgent. Tech research company Gartner predicts that traffic to the open web, including to publishers’ websites, from search engines will fall by 25 percent by 2026. This is just one year away. The CMA has the teeth to challenge Google and to help create a fairer digital marketplace for everyone, publishers included. We can then hope that regulators around the world will follow suit.
A Global Problem Demanding Coordinated Action: The CMA’s investigation is not happening in isolation. Similar probes are underway across the EU and globally, including under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and through national competition authorities. The fact that multiple jurisdictions are actively scrutinising Google’s practices sends a clear message: things are not as they should be in the digital market.
Read more at the EPC’s Vision Paper.