Anti-Google lobbyist in NZ

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A Microsoft-funded lobby group trying to cut Google down to size has visited Wellington to gauge the appetite for an Asia-Pacific branch that would advocate for improved online competition in the region.

David Wood, Brussels-based legal counsel for the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace (Icomp), met Australian and New Zealand regulators – including the Commerce Commission – and publishers and advertisers.

Icomp advocates on behalf of 60 European organisations and businesses, including online businesses, which bump up against the likes of internet search giant Google, Mr Wood says.

Google's dominance means it is often involved in online competition issues, he says.

The search company has been found to adjust search results to prominently feature links belonging to commercial partners and blacklist competitors' results, he says.

A spokesperson for Google flatly denied those allegations.

"We believe the objectivity of our search results is essential. We do not manually intervene with search results, and ads and search rankings are totally unrelated."

The San Francisco Chronicle this month reported a Google search for the hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas prominently listed links to online music store Lala, one of Google's commercial partners, Mr Wood says.

"Other businesses' results are going down as a result of that but consumers don't know that."

Google competitors, such as search company Foundem and online map services, have been blacklisted by Google, disappearing from its search results entirely, he says.

Google's foray into scanning and selling out-of-print books online is also worrying, Mr Wood says.

The company will scan and sell books registered with the United States Copyright Office or published in Britain, Australia and Canada, after reaching a deal with publishers' organisations.

It began digitising books from US libraries, including New Zealand books, in 2004 but scaled back the scheme in the face of objections and legal action from its competitors, publishers and the US Justice Department.

Much of the controversy has been about copyright but "Google is not doing this to become a bookseller", Mr Wood says.

"It's all about search. It will give Google immense new capacity to input into their search engine."

- © Fairfax NZ News