Google owns the world’s most prevalent search engine, which includes one of the leading news aggregators today, Google News. This dominance forces news outlets big and small to play ball with the search giant in order to have their content show up in either. In 2020, French newsrooms declared victory after Google conceded to paying news publishers more ad revenue through a slate of licensing deals. Journalists in Spain might follow suit in the future after the country's competition watchdog opens an antitrust investigation into Google.

The Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) announced in a press release that it is investigating Google's practices of publishing news content by publishers in the country (via TechCrunch). The regulators are concerned about potential anticompetitive behavior by the search giant affecting Spanish publishers and news agencies.

"In particular, these practices would consist the possible imposition of unfair commercial conditions on the publishers of press publications and news agencies established in Spain for the exploitation of their content protected by intellectual property rights," a machine-translated version of the CNMC's press release reads.

The investigation is in response to a complaint filed by the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights. Regulators are also looking into whether Google's practices stifle free competition at the expense of the public good. The CNMC will conduct its investigation over the next 18 months, and both Google and the media organization will be able to present their cases during this time.

Google has faced numerous antitrust complaints in recent years regarding how it displays content snippets in search results. In 2021, the Mountain View-based behemoth threatened to shut down Google Search in Australia after regulators enacted new rules requiring Google (and Facebook) to pay publishers for the content that appears in search results. In the end, Google agreed to pay some Australian publishers after the government pushed through with the policy.

Seeing as Google continues to gobble up billions of ad dollars while newsrooms around the world struggle to survive, it makes sense that some of them would stand up to the titan and force it to give them a decent payout for their content.