Google has accused Microsoft of ‘bald corporate opportunism’ after supporting US legislation to make technology platforms pay for news, reviving the long dormant dispute between technology giants.
The pair traded resurgence as Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared at a congressional hearing Friday to discuss a bill that would make it easier for media organizations to jointly reach deals with technology platforms on how its content is distributed – similar to the proposal adopted in Australia last month.
In an extensive blog post he published during the trial, Smith argued that “earning money for traffic has become increasingly difficult for news organizations because most of the profits have been squeezed out by Google”.
“Google has effectively transformed itself into the ‘front page’ for news by owning the readership and redirecting news content on their properties to a commodity import,” he said.
In response, Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, accused Microsoft of ‘bald corporate opportunism’, arguing that the company ‘makes self-sufficient claims and. . . even willing to break the way the open web works in an attempt to undermine a competitor. “
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment, saying “We are focused on the issue that Congress is considering today.”
Microsoft and Google are fierce competitors that have been battling for almost a decade, often through antitrust cases. But the groups reached a ceasefire in 2016 and agreed to withdraw all competition charges against each other. Today, businesses compete on cloud computing, search, video conferencing, and email, among other things.
Two senators – Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Louisiana Republican John Kennedy – reintroduced the two-party bill on Wednesday, aimed at shifting commercial power to struggling newsgroups from dominant technology platforms.
This comes a few weeks after Australia passed a similar law, which was also supported by Microsoft. During the debate on the bill, Facebook introduced a controversial news break in Australia until Canberra agreed to several amendments in its favor.
During Friday’s trial, journalist Glenn Greenwald, founder of The Intercept, said that the US proposals risked a further consolidation of the media power in the country. “I’m particularly concerned that we have an increasingly concentrated news media where The New York Times is becoming like Amazon’s journalism,” he told the committee.
Google’s Walker also claimed on Friday that Microsoft was trying to deduce from recent revelations that vulnerabilities in the software had played a role in facilitating two major hacking campaigns targeting hundreds of thousands of businesses and government agencies worldwide.
Microsoft came under fire this year after cyber experts said Russian spies had “systemic vulnerabilities” in their verification process to gain unrestricted access to data in the SolarWinds hack, which endangers US treasury and trade divisions.
Last week, the company also announced that four bugs in its Exchange software had been exploited by a Chinese state-backed hacking group called Hafnium to gain access to victims’ email systems.
Although it issued corrections for the bugs, a flood of other burglary groups – including loose money attackers – have now rushed to exploit the vulnerabilities, which U.S. and British officials have warned. An estimated 30,000 U.S. companies were hit.
Unlike its competitors, whose executives have been brought before Congress several times over the past year to answer accusations of competitiveness, Microsoft has largely escaped the criticism of Big Tech.
This differs from Microsoft’s treatment of policymakers in the 1990s, when its dominance over the computer industry led to a protracted legal battle, and the company only carefully avoided being broken up.