As part of Times Network’s efforts to raise awareness about the rights of news publishers and the multiple dimensions of the ongoing tussle globally with Big Tech, Times Now featured its second episode on the issue titled ‘Publishers vs Big Tech’ on April 18, 2026. Moderated by Times Now’s Senior Executive Editor Madhavdas Gopalakrishnan, the show focused on how, in multiple jurisdictions, Google (Alphabet Inc being its parent company) has been under scrutiny over alleged anti-competitive practices in different layers of its advertising technology stack. News publishers have claimed that they are losing out on advertising revenue due to lack of transparency and also Google’s market position in online digital advertising intermediation services. In India, the Competition Commission of India has been looking into multiple such complaints. In the United States, the Department of Justice took Google to court in an anti-trust suit, while both the European Commission and Britain’s competition watchdog have been examining Google’s actions.
The show featured an engaging discussion with experts who offered a multiplicity of perspectives on this evolving debate.
Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and online civil liberties activist, explained why jurisdictions in different parts of the world are looking into Google’s actions in the ad-tech space. She said: “…Google not only sells advertising on its own websites and apps, but between the advertisers who want to place their ads online and the publishers, it also fits in completely there. And these advertisers and publishers are relying on this ad tech industry’s digital tools for the placement of real-time ads which are not linked only to a search query. Now, it could be banner ads, it could be programmatic ads. Now, those buying tools which have been at least a discussion in the Virginia case, in the EU case etc, Google is the one which is providing all of these technologies..but because of that position where you not only control the ad tech, you’re also interested and playing in the field yourself and you compete in that field yourself and you have a dominant position, then how does a regulator which is supposed to make markets more competitive going to address this issue and then ensure that all actors behave in a manner that the playing field is levelled?”
Kanishk Agarwal, Technology and AI expert, weighed in on the contentious issue of revenue sharing. He said: “Let’s look at the advertising agencies and others. Google has become an ecosystem where it works for everybody. But the challenge is that they lose around 5% to 30% per impression, which is a major problem from a monetization model perspective. They do not have any subscription base. There is no even business and there is no branded content pipeline. So, when Google is using these unified pricing rules, it suppresses the flow prices of these regional channels and others. So this competitive shift towards the Google ecosystem perspective – that’s the real challenge. From a CCI perspective, India is not Europe, neither is it the US. The question for the CCI is not about how do we punish Google or any other platform. I think we have to focus on how we can build an open ad-exchange layer, that we build an open payments layer. Why not?”
Swapnil Srivastava, an advocate, said Google operates in an open market and in India, nothing has been proven conclusively to suggest it engages in anti-competitive practices. He said: “What we need to understand today is that we are in an open market. Anybody can do what they want to. Anybody can price their services the way they want to. And Indian law specifically does not prevent anybody from assuming a dominant position in any given industry. The problem arises when they begin to abuse that position to create anti-competitive issues within the market. So far as that is concerned, on two occasions in the last 10 years, whoever has come and claimed issues against Google has failed to prove that in the court of law… So it remains to be seen what has changed in the last eight odd months that new claims can be sustainable against Google so far as anti-competition is concerned.”
The key issue, according to Venkat Lakshminarasimha, ED and Head of Solutions for India and the Middle East at Dexian, is transparency. He said: “When the same company has access to the infrastructure, to the demand side platform, supply side platform and everything else, there is no transparency in the system. I think all that we should be looking at is transparency in the system so that maybe an independent audit can be done on how demand side and supply side are matched in the exchange platform. It is not so much about how successful Google is. It’s rather about how transparent Google can be in India for the services that they offer.”
