• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 25, 2026

The News/Media Alliance (N/MA), which serves 2,200 publishers in the U.S., has stepped into the U.K. debate over Google’s status.

On Wednesday, the N/MA submitted comments responding to the proposed conduct requirements for Google announced by the Competition And Markets Authority (CMA). And it did not spare Google’s feelings.   

History shows that “Google has consistently abused its dominant market position, forcing publishers and others to accept its terms and conditions, ranking criteria, and changes without providing website owners with effective controls or complaint methods, and using publisher content indiscriminately in products, features, and use purposes that go well beyond those imagined by publishers in the first place," the N/MA states. "All the while, publishers have no option but to accept these practices or risk their visibility in search.”

Why is the N/MA commenting on U.K. regulations? Because the group also represents “publishers based in and with significant operations, and UK readership.” 

The N/MA suggests that the CMA go further than it has by requiring these changes (and we quote): 

• "Requiring Google to use separate scrapers, or functional equivalent, one for each use purpose, providing more certainty to publishers
• Ensuring that any behavioral remedies can be effectively monitored, implemented and enforced in a way that provides publishers to regain a degree of the economic certainty and control that Google has usurped through its dominant position."

The proposal continues that Google follow these suggested guidelines:

• "Standardizing controls across features, products, and services;
• Ensuring any controls are sufficiently granular, providing publishers with page- and feature-level controls for search, training, grounding, and fine-tuning;
• Prohibiting unauthorized downstream uses, including sub-licensing, reselling, and making available of publisher content;
• Providing separate controls for all future technologies, products, features, and services;
• Establishing an oversight board with publisher participation to work with Google to develop and evolve publisher controls;
• Pushing back on Google’s assertions regarding fine-tuning and providing publishers with meaningful control over it;
• Closing loopholes that would allow Google to circumvent publisher controls and acquire content from elsewhere;
• Ensuring that Google cannot delay or defer its obligations through shifting the focus to group standard setting processes;
• Bringing forward the implementation timeline to require Google to provide new controls within three months;
• Adding an effects-based test to avoid Google circumventing Publisher conduct requirement 3(b)(1) not to “intentionally” rank lower publishers who exercise their opt-out rights;
• Providing more descriptive requirements on fair ranking transparency and complaint handling processes in order to ensure that reputable publishers are not downranked in search through Google’s blunt application of its content quality policies; and
• Allowing users to opt-out of AI experiences and switch back to traditional search if wanted." 

These suggestions are designed to “achieve the CMA’s stated goals, ensure meaningful benefits to publishers, and to avoid Google circumventing or undermining the requirements,” the N/MA writes.

It is doubtful that all these suggestions will be adopted. But even if only a few of them make it in, that would be a major contribution on the part of the N/MA.