Google News honors news sources' wishes

Your Aug. 30 editorial ["Rapacious? Google it," Opinion] seems to misunderstand both competition law and how Google News works.

Under the antitrust laws, there's no problem with a company becoming successful, so long as it earns it fair and square. The problem is when companies act illegally to maintain their market position -- by foreclosing competition or making it difficult for users to switch. No one has seriously suggested that Google's success is due to anything other than hard work and constant improvement.

Your editorial also wrongly suggests that news organizations can't withdraw their content from Google News without also removing it from all Google searches. That's false. Publishers are in complete control over where and whether their content appears.

News organizations can use a universally honored technical standard called "robots.txt" to block their content from being indexed by Google and other search engines. And if they want to be removed only from Google News, they can just tell us directly, and we'll remove them.

Still, of more than 25,000 news sources, only a handful have chosen to be removed. Why? Because Google News sends news organizations more than a billion clicks each month, which they can use to win loyal readers and generate more advertising revenue.

-- Kent Walker, Google general counsel, Washington, D.C.