Google accused Microsoft of “pure corporate opportunism” after supporting US legislation to make technology platforms pay for the news, rekindling the long-dormant rivalry between tech giants.
The pair exchanged barbs while Microsoft President Brad Smith appeared at a Congressional hearing on Friday to discuss a bill that would make it easier for media organizations to collectively reach agreements with technology platforms about how their content is distributed – similar to one approved in Australia last month.
In a lengthy blog post published while he was in the audience, Smith argued that “monetizing that traffic has become increasingly difficult for news organizations because most of the profit has been squeezed by Google.”
“Google has effectively become the” front page “of news, having the relationship with the reader and relegating the news content on its properties to a commodity,” he said.
In a response post, Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, accused Microsoft of “blatant corporate opportunism”, arguing that the company was “making selfish and egregious claims. . . even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undermine a rival. ”
A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment, saying, “We are focused on the issue that Congress is considering today.”
Microsoft and Google are fierce rivals who have fought for nearly a decade, often through antitrust cases. But the groups reached a truce in 2016, agreeing to withdraw all claims of competition among themselves. Today companies compete in cloud computing, research, video conferencing and e-mail, among other areas.
Two senators – Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana – reintroduced the bipartisan bill on Wednesday, which seeks to transfer commercial power to struggling newsgroups on dominant technology platforms.
This happens several weeks after Australia passed a similar law, which was also supported by Microsoft. During the debate over the bill, Facebook imposed a controversial news blackout in Australia until Canberra agreed to several amendments in its favor.
During Friday’s hearing, journalist Glenn Greenwald, founder of The Intercept, said the US proposals risk further consolidation of media power in the country. “I am particularly concerned that we have a news media that is becoming increasingly concentrated, where The New York Times is becoming like the Amazon of journalism,” he told the committee.
On Friday, Google’s Walker also said that Microsoft was trying to distract itself from recent revelations that vulnerabilities in its software played a role in facilitating two major hacker campaigns targeting hundreds of thousands of companies and government agencies worldwide .
Microsoft faced scrutiny this year after cyber experts said suspected Russian spies had exercised “systemic weaknesses” in their authentication process to gain unrestricted access to data in the SolarWinds hack, which has compromised U.S. Treasury and trade departments.
Last week, the company also announced that four flaws in its Exchange software were exploited by a group of hackers backed by the Chinese state called Hafnium to gain access to victims’ email systems.
Although it released bug fixes, a flurry of other hacker groups – including ransomware attackers – have now rushed to exploit the vulnerabilities, generating warnings from US and UK officials. It is estimated that 30,000 American companies have been affected.
In contrast to its rivals, whose executives were taken to Congress several times in the past year to respond to accusations of anti-competitive behavior, Microsoft largely escaped criticism of Big Tech.
He diverged from Microsoft’s treatment of policymakers in the 1990s, when his dominance of the computer industry led to a protracted legal battle, with the company narrowly avoiding being spun off.