Dear News Corp & Google: An Open Letter On Their Open Letters To Each Other Over Competition
Last week, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp sent an open letter to the European Union outlining competition concerns it has about Google. This week, Google has fired back with its own open letter addressed to Murdoch.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest round in a Murdoch–Google feud that has run since at least 2009, when Google's chief questioned Murdoch's online pay plan on Reuters, and 2012, when Google dismissed Murdoch's piracy allegations as 'nonsense'. What changed this week is the venue: instead of trading jabs through the press, News Corp took its case directly to Brussels with an open letter to the European Union, and Google answered with a public letter of its own.
First-order effects
- News Corp converts a long-running executive-level feud into a formal regulatory complaint, putting its competition concerns before the EU rather than leaving them as press commentary.
- Google is pushed into a rare public, written defense aimed at a single antagonist — a shift from its usual back-channel responses to criticism.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers gain a template: if News Corp's EU letter draws traction, rival content owners face pressure to file their own complaints rather than negotiate bilaterally with the platform.
- The leaked disclosures circulating the same week — documents showing Google requiring device makers like Samsung to pre-install up to 20 Google apps and working to limit Samsung's grip on Android — hand EU reviewers fresh evidence that maps onto exactly the bundling concerns News Corp is raising.
Third-order effects
- If complaints-by-open-letter become the norm, platform-versus-publisher disputes migrate from opinion pages into formal competition proceedings, where the EU's verdicts carry binding consequences rather than reputational cost.
- Platforms' counter-moves — public rebuttal letters aimed at named critics — harden into a standard defensive playbook, making every regulatory filing a two-front battle fought partly in public.
The trend: Publisher–platform disputes are migrating from press-feud exchanges between executives to formal filings with competition regulators, with the European Union as the venue of choice.