“News Corp Australia recognises that divestment is a significant remedy, which may involve global co-ordination, 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,” the News submission to the ACCC says.
This is part of a global campaign by the Murdoch empire in response to what it calls “the pervasive and pernicious market power of the major digital platforms”.
The company is full of flattery for the leadership role played by the ACCC. It claims it can show the way for the Federal Trade Commission in the United States and the European Commission.
This particular fight between old media and new media has brought together some strange bedfellows. Murdoch has had plenty of tough fights with competition regulators, who often stood in the way of his ambitions.
In the fight against Google and Facebook, Murdoch finds himself not only in harmony with competition regulators but also politicians with less conservative political views. Last week, Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren said she would break up Google, Facebook and Amazon if elected president in 2020.
Chanticleer suspects Murdoch and Warren’s campaigns against the technology giants will fail at the feet of geopolitical reality. Is the US really going to break up its most powerful corporations and allow companies of similar size and power from China to take their place?
Technology moves too fast for politicians to start drawing lines in the sand about what can and can’t be under one corporate umbrella. Is the Microsoft of 2019 any less powerful than the Microsoft that was restrained by the European Commission in response to the internet browser war of the 1990s? Where does the break-up strategy end? Are all fully integrated entities that serve consumers anti-competitive and, therefore, in need of being broken apart?
The ACCC has presented strong arguments for the federal government to implement non-structural remedies for dealing with the market power of digital platforms. To go down the route of breaking companies apart is a decade-long exercise that is likely to be overtaken by technology.
TONY BOYD
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