Daily Mail Files Antitrust Suit Against Google Over Alleged Story Suppression

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The Daily Mail filed suit against Google’s parent company on Tuesday for “anti-competitive” practices, arguing the search giant was unlawfully preventing users from finding many of its stories from in search results.

The suit, filed against Alphabet on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in New York by Associated Newspapers Ltd. and Mail Media Inc, the British publication’s parent company, said publishers were penalized in search results if they failed to sell enough advertising through Google.

“This lawsuit is to hold Google to account for their continued anti-competitive behavior including manipulation of ad auctions and news search results, bid-rigging, algorithm bias and exploiting its market power to harm their advertising rivals,” a Daily Mail spokesman said in a statement.

Google’s search results have been increasingly unfavorable for certain publishers over the last several years, particularly in its “News” section, and especially for right-leaning websites. A brief glitch in July temporarily prevented several of the affected websites from appearing in search results entirely, including The Drudge Report, Newsbusters, and Breitbart News.

The Daily Mail claimed in its Tuesday suit that suppressed keywords affecting its site included the names of Prince Henry and Meghan Markle, Prince Philip, and Piers Morgan.

Google has been facing a slew of antitrust actions, including from a bipartisan group of state attorneys general, who filed suit against Google and Facebook in December. That suit alleged Google approached Facebook in 2018 to suggest the companies work together on an advertising program that undercut publishers’ ability to earn revenue, and that Google gave Facebook special treatment in exchange for its assistance.

The parent company of West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail also filed a similar suit against Google and Facebook in January, while a separate group of publishers filed suit on Monday.

A spokesperson for Google denied the latest claims in a statement. “The Daily Mail’s claims are completely inaccurate,” the spokesperson said. “The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher’s website ranks in Google Search. More generally, we compete in a crowded and competitive ad tech space where publishers have and exercise multiple options.”