Department of Justice Will Not Challenge Proposed Online Subscription News Service

The Department of Justice announced that it will not challenge a proposal by MyWire to form the Global News Service, an online subscription news aggregation service.

The service would provide interconnections among different publishers' online content, such as news articles and video and audio clips, that relate to the same topic. Based on representations made by MyWire, the department said that the formation and operation of the news service is not likely to reduce competition among Internet publishers and could provide procompetitive benefits to both publishers and consumers. The Department of Justice's position was stated in a business review letter to counsel for MyWire from Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. The service would provide Internet publishers with a "related-item" content block that a publisher would add to its Web page. The block would contain hyperlinked abstracts of content from other participating publishers' Web sites. By clicking these hyperlinks, consumers would be able to browse among related material from different publishers' websites.