News Corp calls for Google to be broken up due to its 'overwhelming' power

Media giant News Corp told an Australian inquiry on Tuesday that Google’s search engine and its advertising platform should be separated to restore some balance among media companies.

News Corp told the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission at an inquiry into digital platforms that Google's "overwhelming" market power no longer leaves room for digital publishers to compete with it for advertising.

In its submission, News Corp said: “Google leverages its market power in both general search services and ad tech services to the detriment of consumers, advertisers and news publishers.

“To remedy these harms, Google could either sell Google Search, or retain Google Search and divest the rest of its businesses to a third party.”

It added: “News Corp Australia recognises that divestment is a significant remedy, which may involve global coordination, however the ACCC should support it in light of the overwhelming market power that Google holds in relation to online search and its advertising businesses.”

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is currently battling Google parent Alphabet as it tries to win back billions of dollars in advertising revenue which has flowed to Google from its newspapers in the past ten years.

The call from News Corp comes as US Senator Elizabeth Warren suggested last week that Facebook and other tech giants such as Google or Amazon should be broken up. She posted ads for her campaign with said message on Facebook and the company took them down.

Facebook later on responded by saying they would restore the ads and had hidden them in the first place “for violating the policies against the use of their corporate logo."