"It also claims that Google Images� display of photos from sites and publishers, instead of original licensed content, is bad for consumers."

Fingers crossed.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/23/getty-eu-google-antitrust-investigation

An alternate opinion, which blames Getty itself for poor SEO and complicated purchasing:

http://www.thesempost.com/getty-images-blames-google-not-competitors/

An alternate opinion, which blames Getty itself for poor SEO and complicated purchasing:

http://www.thesempost.com/getty-images-blames-google-not-competitors/

Lovely

It isn't entirely fair in that the purchase example is an RM image - it would have easier (and more comparable to their competitors) if they picked an RF image. But the overall points are valid.

Getty's biggest problem is its private equity ownership and its own greedy+inept management of a once segment leading business.

It would be good if some of these articles linked sources.  It's one thing to search for "coffee shop stock photos" and another to search for "coffee shop" stock photos, obviously you'll get better results that are more likely to have the original source if you include "stock photo" in your search, the complaint seems to be more about searches for "coffee shop" which is more likely to have a large unwatermarked nonoriginal source at the top of the results.

i'm totally anti-google but in this case sorry but Google owes you nothing and getty's complaints are pointless ... google images is a free service and they have their own terms of use, if you don't like you're free to block google from indexing your images and find a better deal with their competitors or pay google for pushing your pics on top of every search.

the issue at stake is google's dominance in search, but that's another story.
google has taken over the search market and played its cards well, now it's too late to be shocked at their dominance .. let me remind you when google came up 15 yrs ago their only competitors were cr-ap like Altavista, Yahoo, and Ask.com !

now google has spread like a virus into every possible niche, from e-commerce to maps and images and operating system (android, and much more) ... too late to cry they're dominant and that youtube's content is 90% pirate and illegal.

google is the world's leader in piracy, and this includes their core business, the search engine as they're using "snippets" of text giving nothing back to the legitimate owners, let alone asking permission for that, for a while they also paired the text with screenshots, which was illegal and they've been forced to stop .. but if no one stops them they will keep acting as if they "own" the entire web ... and they know very well their business would be unprofitable if they had to play by the rules, which goes the same way for FB and many others.

content producers are the ones paying the price for this modern "free economy" but it can't go on forever and companies like google and FB must be shut down.

As this is specifically a microstock group, maybe you could tell us how to prevent our content, legitimately purchased and online, from being indexed by Google for subsequent free lifting by the world and his wife, which as I showed not long ago, Google openly advocates.

there are many ways, all server-side, these are the most common to avoid "hot linking" :

1 - block the googlebots using the robots.txt
2 - block them using ".htaccess"
3 - forbid bots from scraping any .jpg file

How can we do any of that on a buyer's website which we obviously have no access to?

Exactly!  We can't.   +1 Sue.

Hard to believe any content producers would argue this is okay.  Antitrust laws exist for the exact reason of preventing such abuses by monopolies.   Hope Google gets spanked in this lawsuit.