News/Media Alliance asks DOJ, FTC to probe Google's spam policy
News/Media Alliance sent a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission on October 7 asking them to investigate Google’s “site reputation abuse” policy as anticompetitive. The policy targets spammy, mass-produced content hosted on reputable domains; the publisher trade group says Google has instead used it to de-rank or delist legitimate publisher pages, including affiliate and coupon content used for customer acquisition. NMA points to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and the EU, which it says already require fair-ranking, anti-discrimination, and appeals rules for Google, and asks US regulators to match that oversight. The letter names no specific publisher or case, and neither agency has said whether it will open an investigation.
Why it matters: A publisher trade group is asking US antitrust regulators to take up a Search ranking policy the way the UK and EU already have, which would pull ranking enforcement itself — not just training data or traffic sharing — into the federal antitrust fight over Google.
The record: GoogleAI training & copyright litigation
Posted to the wire October 7, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.