Gannett Co. sues Google on behalf of oldest newspaper; JCPA would call for sharing advertising revenue

Jul 1, 2023

The company brought its suit before the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. Lawsuits are already pending in federal courts by competing advertising networks, the U.S. Department of Justice and more than two dozen state attorneys general.

The Gannett Company has added to the woes of social media platform Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., by filing yet another lawsuit targeting Google’s sales and management of digital advertising. The company brought its suit before the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. Lawsuits are already pending in federal courts by competing advertising networks, the U.S. Department of Justice and more than two dozen state attorneys general.

Gannett complains that a $200 billion digital advertising market is unfairly monopolized by Google’s digital advertising network, which is tied to Google’s software and technology used by advertisers to buy advertising space. The publisher sues in New York on behalf of its daily newspaper, the Poughkeepsie Journal, founded in 1785, which Gannett says is the oldest of its publications. The suit seeks damages for harm to Gannett newspapers.

The suit also alleges that Google made $60 billion in 2022 from ads sold on news content pages. Newspapers have long complained that social media platforms unfairly sell advertising around news content taken through hyperlinks to local newspapers without payment to the newspapers.

The suits seek injunctive relief to stop Google from exercising its monopoly powers. The federal government has called for federal courts to break up the company.

Legislation pending in Congress would seek a different result: it would require Google and Facebook (Meta) to negotiate damages with a panel of local news producers to be distributed to a wide array of newspapers and broadcasters. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is awaiting action by the U.S. Senate.

National Newspaper Association Chair John Galer, publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Illinois, said that although the legislation and the various lawsuits offer different remedies for monopolization of the digital advertising marketplace, all actions that draw attention to the problem aid the cause of local journalism organizations.

“As Gannett points out, readers are using digital media to get local news, and newspapers are producing the local news at considerable expense,” Galer said. “But Google gets the advertising money, and newspapers bear the cost of news-gathering. This situation is not sustainable.

“We doubt Google or Facebook intend to employ thousands of reporters, editors and photographers in local markets. But without healthy newspapers who do employ those people and provide them the means to reach their audiences, there will eventually be a dearth of local news on the internet.

“We understand some fear that removing free access to everything through hyperlinks will break the internet. But that is not likely to happen. A fair result would be sharing of the advertising revenue with the producers of the local news. That is what JCPA proposes and what the NNA supports. Now, with a complex and costly set of lawsuits pending in federal court, Congress should get moving to fix this problem. The solution is available. Now we just have to make it happen.”