Google and Microsoft's Bing agree to demote piracy search results in the UK by June 1, 2017, as part of a deal with the entertainment industry
Google and Microsoft's Bing have agreed to crack down on piracy sites in the UK after years of wrangling with film and music rights holders.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 deal closed years of wrangling between the search engines and film and music rights holders, replacing litigation pressure with a negotiated commitment: both companies would demote piracy sites in UK results rather than wait for court blocking orders. It was an early instance of the UK extracting ranking concessions from Google through negotiation instead of regulation.
That pattern has since hardened into official intervention. Google's agreement with the CMA to curb fake reviews extended the negotiate-and-report model, and by 2026 the regulator had moved to mandates — letting publishers opt out of AI Overviews and ordering greater transparency into how rankings work, alongside data portability. The piracy deal reads now as the first step in a decade-long arc of UK leverage over search.
First-order effects
- UK users searching for pirated film and music see infringing sites pushed below licensed alternatives from June 1, 2017, hitting traffic to those sites without any court order being filed.
- Google and Microsoft take on a standing commitment to the entertainment industry, giving rights holders a direct channel to shape search results short of legal action.
Second-order effects
- Demoted piracy traffic flows toward licensed streaming and download services, strengthening the subscription market the labels and studios were pushing users toward.
- The deal gives UK authorities a working template — negotiated ranking changes with compliance expectations — that later produced the CMA's fake-reviews reporting arrangement with Google.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search rankings stop being treated as purely editorial and become negotiable policy instruments, which is where the UK ended up by 2026 with mandated ranking transparency and publisher opt-outs.
- Bing's willingness to sign on matters less over time as Microsoft winds down external access via its Search APIs shutdown, leaving Google as the primary target of future UK ranking interventions.
The trend: UK oversight of search is shifting from voluntary industry deals over specific result categories to formal regulatory control of how rankings work at all.