Dear Rupert: Google responds to News Corp’s open letter to EU

In response to a recent open letter from News Corp to the European Commission accusing Google of exploiting its “dominant market position to stifle competition,” Google today issued an official response in a blog post published on its European Policy blog.

While noting its efforts to help publishers through various online initiatives, Google also addressed News Corp’s claim that the company is a “platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks”:

Google has done more than almost any other company to help tackle online piracy… Search: In 2013 we removed 222 million web pages from Google Search due to copyright infringement. The average take-down time is now just six hours. And we downgrade websites that regularly violate copyright in our search rankings… Video: We’ve invested tens of millions of dollars in innovative technology — called ContentID — to tackle piracy on YouTube.

Google is also an industry leader in combating child sexual abuse imagery online. We use hashing technology to remove illegal imagery from all our products and from the search index. We have safe modes for both Search and YouTube that filter out inappropriate content. And we are committed to protecting our users’ security. It’s why we remove malware from our search results and other products, and protect more than 1 billion users every day from phishing and malware with our Safe Browsing warnings.

Google’s blog post continues by tackling each and every point made in the original open letter from News Corp including defending its search practices for displaying its own content in search results and more. Most of it is stuff we’ve heard from Google’s side in the past, but in case you’re wondering Google’s side to the argument in the long running EU anti-trust investigations, the article does a good job of laying out exactly how Google feels about the situation.