Google hits back at Rupert Murdoch over claim it is 'platform for piracy'

Google has hit back at a claim by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp that it is a "platform for piracy", arguing that it does more than "almost any other company" to fight illegal online activity.

In a post entitled "Dear Rupert" on its Google Europe blog on Thursday, the online search company responded to last week's open letter from News Corp to the European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson had branded the internet giant a "platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks".

Rachel Whetstone, the former adviser to British Conservative leader Michael Howard who is now Google's senior vice-president for global communications, hit back that last year Google removed 222 million webpages which broke copyright rules, taking the pages down within six hours on average. She added that websites which regularly violated copyright regulations were "downgraded" in its search rankings.

"Google is also an industry leader in combating child sexual abuse," she said. "And we are committed to protecting our users' security. It's why we remove malware from our search results and other products."

Whetstone also poked fun at Thomson's assertion that by undermining the "basic business model of professional content creators" Google was helping create a "less informed, more vexatious level of dialogue", with the result that "intemperate trends" across Europe would proliferate.