Google says Microsoft’s position on the News is an effort to distract from the hack

Microsoft President Brad Smith discussed Google at length in his remarks at Friday’s meeting, saying that online news is the food that fuels Google’s search and advertising network and suggesting ways in which the search giant could better support the news industry. He expressed support for legislation that would give news organizations more bargaining power with Facebook and Google.

Other proponents of the bill include the News Media Alliance, an industry trade group that includes News Corp.,

editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Just before the meeting, Google’s vice president of global affairs, Kent Walker, fired a blog post. He defended Google’s support for journalism, saying it paid publishers links to their work and accused Microsoft of “empty corporate opportunism”.

“They are returning to their familiar playing card of attacking rivals and lobbying for regulations that benefit their own interests,” Mr Walker wrote. “Now they are making independent claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works, in an effort to undermine a rival.”

Mr Walker said it was “no coincidence” that Microsoft’s attacks on Google were based on an ongoing examination of the role of the software giant in two recent hacks.

Microsoft offers a news app and website that it says includes content from more than 1,200 publishers. Google, a unit of the Alphabet Inc.,

said in October that it was hiring $ 1 billion for a new product called the Google News Showcase that would support publishers around the world.

Mr Walker described Microsoft’s history of supporting the news as “inappropriate” and said the rival paid less to publishers than Google.

Microsoft declined to comment on Google’s statement. Google declined to comment.

The dispute was sparked by a global debate over new regulations that would require platforms to pay publishers to connect to their news sites. Last month, Australia introduced legislation that would require such payments, triggering multi-year licensing agreements between Google and Facebook with content providers such as News Corp.

Google had threatened to leave Australia because of the law.

During his testimony on Friday, Mr Smith described Australia’s law as reasonable and said Google’s plans to exit were harmful to the country, people and publishers. He said he and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella assured the country’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, that they were willing to run Bing by a smaller margin than Google, because it was important “that we all we succeed together ”.

“When companies start threatening countries and saying that if their lawmakers pass laws, they don’t like to retire and leave, then something seems a little out of the ordinary,” Mr Smith said. He added: “No one should be above the law. No person, no government, no company, no technology. ”

Microsoft’s pressure comes as Google defends itself against the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit filed last fall, claiming that it has illegally maintained its dominant position as the web’s preeminent search engine by concluding trade agreements to exclude competitors. A trial is not expected until the end of 2023, but regulatory pressure has inflamed tensions between technology companies facing new control in Washington.

Microsoft and Google have been fighting over the Internet gatekeeper since the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer began to give way to what was then a search engine startup. As Microsoft rejected an antitrust investigation, Google grew more and more and became the main web browser, email provider, and mobile service. Tensions between technology companies have intensified as their competition has expanded to new businesses.

Microsoft and Google are both competitors and partners in a number of business lines. The Microsoft Bing search engine competes with the most used Google service. Google’s efforts to build its cloud computing division bring the company into more direct competition with Microsoft. But the software company in Redmond, Washington, is also relying on Google’s Android software on some of its Surface gadgets.

Microsoft has a long history of lobbying Google. Under the leadership of Executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft launched an advertising campaign against Google attacks called “Scroogled”, which took place between 2012 and 2014.

When Mr Nadella took over in 2014, he sought a more peaceful relationship and put an end to the attacks. The executive responsible for the advertising campaign, Mark Penn, left in 2015. In 2016, Microsoft and Google brokered a truce and withdrew their regulatory complaints against each other globally.

Microsoft generated approximately $ 7.7 billion in search advertising revenue in its most recent fiscal year. Google had about $ 104 billion in search-related sales last year.

Write to Tripp Mickle at [email protected] and Aaron Tilley at [email protected]