News Corp says Google is a ??platform for piracy??
Source: Rupert Murdoch??
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp weighed into the debate over a proposed European Union settlement with Google Inc.--urging Brussels to throw out the settlement and calling Google a “platform for piracy.”
In a letter to EU antitrust chief Joaquín Almunia on Sept. 8--disclosed by the company Wednesday--News Corp NWSA, +0.06% Chief Executive Robert Thomson echoed other critics of Google’s GOOGL, +0.45% search functions, saying it “systematically diverts users away from relevant sites to its own related sites for commercial reasons.”
New York-based News Corp owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, along with well-known European titles including the Times of London, the Sun and the European edition of the Journal. Thomson served as the top editor for the Journal and Newswires before becoming CEO of News Corp., when it split from 21st Century Fox Inc. FOX, +0.54% in 2013. Murdoch is executive chairman of News Corp and chairman and CEO of Fox.
Thomson’s public comments follow similar ones from some European publishing houses, including Axel Springer SE, the publisher of Germany’s highest-circulation newspaper Bild. News Corp is a significant business in the European media market, but Thomson’s comments add a large American publisher’s voice to the Google settlement debate. Other big U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.11% and Expedia Inc. EXPE, +0.55% , have already been forceful critics of the proposed EU settlement.
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