Google rivals fight digital book plans

Three of Google’s biggest rivals have joined forces to fight its landmark legal settlement with the book publishing industry, marking the first time that the search company’s growing might has provoked a co-ordinated backlash across the industry.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon.com have all joined a coalition led by the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit group that has become a voice against the settlement, to push for changes to the plan.

While Google has faced fierce lobbying from individual competitors before, most notably Microsoft, the co-ordinated attack now being organised against its ambitious digital book plans is the first to unite some of the biggest tech companies against it.

”The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition, said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesperson. “That said, it’s ironic that some of these complaints are coming from a company that abandoned its book digitization effort because it lacked “’commercial intent’.”

The fear aroused by Google’s growing influence over an increasing part of the online world has also proved strong enough to bring former enemies together to oppose it.

The legal brain behind the initiative is Gary Reback, a veteran Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer who was instrumental in pulling together a broad coalition of interests in Silicon Valley in the 1990s to take on Microsoft.

That campaign eventually led to the US Department of Justice taking up its own case against the software group, leading to a court case in which Microsoft was found to have illegally maintained its PC operating system monopoly.

For now, the campaign against Google is set to be narrower than the one that Mr Reback led against Microsoft. It centres on last year’s agreement between Google and book publishers and authors to resolve a class-action lawsuit over the search company’s massive book-scanning project.

Critics of the settlement, which is still awaiting court approval in the US, claim that it will give Google an unfair monopoly in providing digital access to some out-of-print works, and that it will establish a blueprint for the emerging digital books market that will favour the search giant.

However, supporters of the settlement, which has wide support in the book world, say that Google’s efforts will if anything lower the barriers to competition in digital books in the long run. Its efforts will help to sort out the uncertainties that surround digital rights to many works, making it easier for companies that follow it to create their own digital bookstores, said David Balto, an antitrust lawyer who backs the deal.

The Internet Archive has been working on its own project to build a digital archive of printed works, but has fallen behind Google, which says it plans to spend “hundreds of millions of dollars” to scan the collections of a number of university research libraries to build its collection.

Microsoft and Yahoo both confirmed their involvement in the coalition against the book deal. Amazon refused to comment.