A recent Canadian order on news intermediaries like Google has come as a big boost to Indian newspapers and their digital news editions in their fight against the alleged monopolist exploitation of their news content by Google. Prominent Indian newspapers and their digital editions have been making representations against the said abuse of monopoly and position by Google.
According to newspaper sources, Google earns a huge amount of advertisement revenues on the content generated by the digital editions of these newspapers. However, they allege that there is no fair payback or sharing of revenues by Google in this regard, causing huge financial losses to news publishers in India.
According to the Canadian order, an online news Act has been created to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace. The Act applies to digital news intermediaries like Google. The order envisages provisions of fair compensation to news businesses for the news that is made available by the intermediary.
