Google Takes FTC to Task Over Journalism’s Future

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism, but does that mean the government should step in?


The Federal Trade Commission last month issued a “discussion draft” paper that proposed things like legislation to limit news aggregators, and tax breaks and antitrust exemptions for news organizations. Other reports, like one from Columbia University, also have suggested that the government take a bigger role in supporting journalism. This week, tech giant Google put in its two cents — or 20 pages, to be exact — questioning the FTC draft proposals and saying that “business problems require business solutions” rather than regulation.

The problem, Google says, is that newspapers have failed to keep up with the times. To back up its argument, Google quotes the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News on lessons he learned from the paper’s failure, including that the company made a mistake by seeing its website as relatively unimportant.

Google points out that search engines and services like Google News allow news organizations to find new audiences. And it says the Internet has increased the opportunity for new publishers — like bloggers — to enter the market. Meanwhile, the FTC draft focuses on newspapers and mentions the word “blog” only once in 35 pages, as City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis pointed out on his blog.

Google also argues that journalists should not have a copyright on so-called “hot news” or scoops, given that journalists have long reported the work of others and that facts shouldn’t be copyrighted. (It’s no surprise that Google comes down on the side of news aggregators, since Google itself operates one, but this brief uses tougher language than Google has in the past.)

The tech giant comes out strongly against breaks for news organizations and journalists, pointing out that historically the FTC has opposed such exemptions.

But there’s still a consensus that journalism is an important part of democracy. The question is whether that part of its role will survive. Other ideas proposed in the FTC document included increasing access to government data and starting a journalism division of AmeriCorps.

Google To Government: Keep Your Hands Off Journalism

Google just published a response to some ideas recently floated by the FTC on how to rescue journalism.

Google's message: "business problems require business solutions rather than regulatory ones."

The FTC document outlines the crisis facing, in particular, print media, and expresses doubt that any new online business model will emerge that can support original journalism. It then goes on to outline a number of possible policy solutions, including:

• Reducing search engines' and aggregators' fair use rights to news content.
• Creating an antitrust exemption that would allow newspapers to form a paywall cartel, and to charge search engines and aggregators for access to their content.

Google says either of these proposals would be bad news for consumers. More broadly, Google rejects the underlying premise: that journalism can't save itself without the government's help: "The data suggest that publishers have yet to come close to maximizing their ability to attract and keep users engaged with their online offerings."

Google, of course, has a powerful financial motive for opposing any new regulation of online news consumption. But if there is a serious case in favor of government-supported journalism, we haven't seen it yet.

By Nick Saint

DoubleVerify Launches Fraud Detection Lab

Digital media-verification company DoubleVerify on Wednesday debuted a research arm to uncover fraudulent sites, as well as malware, spyware, adware and other forms of fraudulent online ads. The Advertising Fraud Detection Lab will investigate ad fraud in real-time and raise awareness of deceptive scams taking place online.

"Marketers are often unaware when compliance is at risk due to rogue publishers acting inappropriately on ad networks and exchanges, and most ad networks don't typically have the capabilities to verify the problem in real-time," said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. "We created the Virtual Visitors technology specifically to combat this problem."

In an initial test, the Lab identified several examples of fraudulent publisher schemes that waste ad spend and put advertisers in danger of severe punishment from the government, regardless of whether they were aware of it taking place or not.

Common -- yet deceptive -- types of fraud observed include misplacing or stealing ad tags, whereby organizations sign up as a legitimate publisher and then re-place the tag onto an inappropriate site for advertisers. Affiliate fraud is another in which publishers using an affiliate program in order to accumulate more traffic upload affiliate sites in hidden iFrames, which users can't see.

Invisible ads, meanwhile, occur when ads are on micro-sized iFrames that are essentially hidden to users because they can't see them even if they are prominently placed on the page.

Launched in May 2008, DoubleVerify launched its real-time verification solution for online ad transactions last May. In March, the startup raised a $10 million series B financing round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

Presently, DoubleVerify's platform and technology verify over 20 billion monthly impressions on behalf of marketers in a range of verticals, including telecom, pharma, retail, finance, CPG, and entertainment.

Late last year, video ad network Tremor Media tapped DoubleVerify for increased accountability and transparency of video ad campaigns. Tremor serves in-stream and in-banner video ads across a network of over 1,500 mid-tier and premium sites including WWE.com and WSJ.com.

The new lab will encourage collaboration between advertisers, ad networks and publishers to fight malicious activities that harm brands, legitimate publishers and users, and negatively affect the industry overall.

In the fall, the group plans to publish a white paper detailing findings from the first few months of its inception and recommending actions to mitigate publisher fraud risk.