India: Announced Competition Commission investigation against Google's alleged abuse in news aggregation

The Competition Commission of India has announced an investigation (Case No. 41 of 2021) against Alphabet Inc. (former Google) after a complaint by the Indian "Digital News Publishers Association". In particular, the Association accuses Google of acting as a gateway between news publishers and newsreaders, because news publishers are dependent on the search engine for the majority of traffic on their websites. Therefore, the Association claims that news publishers must accept every term and condition imposed by Google: for this reason, Google can unilaterally decide not to pay the news publishers for the snippets shown in the search engine results, have disproportionate bargaining power in the advertising revenue sharing and impose the implementation of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) webpage standard.