GORDON BROWN has appeared before some tough audiences lately, but the gathering of dotcom entrepreneurs and advertising executives at the Google conference in Hertfordshire last Monday was not one of them.

Peppering his speech with buzzy terms like “empowerment” and boasting of Britain’s “light touch regulatory system”, the embattled prime minister was a surprise hit. “He really gets it,” said one delegate.

A day later in London, Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, aired her frustrations before the House of Lords communications committee.

Rather than “light touch”, she fears the newspaper industry is suffering from heavy-handed rules that could hasten its demise. “By the time the authorities wake up and realise the gravity of the situation it might be too late,” she said.

Two weeks ago, Bailey reluctantly closed eight newspapers in Derby and Peterborough after deciding they could not be run profitably. A deal to sell them to Johnston Press, which has more operations in the region, was blocked by competition authorities worried about the increased concentration of ownership.

Trinity’s position could not be further from that of Google, which commands half of a £3 billion UK online advertising market that has grown in no time and is expanding at 30% a year.

Unfettered by the 2003 Communications Act, which imposes rules on ownership and market share right down to the local level, its UK income is on track to exceed that of ITV this year, with total internet ad spending set to overtake the TV sector in 2009.

Traditional media resent the widening imbalance between themselves and their digital rivals who have a free hand.

“I am not arguing that they should be regulated more, I am arguing that we should be regulated less,” Bailey added.

She is not alone. Michael Grade, executive chairman of ITV, regularly invokes Google’s liberty when campaigning to overhaul contract-rights renewal — the advertising mechanism imposed on ITV to protect advertisers from his company’s dominance of the television market when Carlton and Granada merged in 2003.

He has good reason. At the time of the merger, ITV1 commanded 51% of the television advertising market; now it has 45%, including digital channels. In contrast, Nielsen Online says Google’s UK share has grown from 57% of all online searches in July 2005 to 81% last month.

In the past 17 months the total number of search queries has risen by 200m to 1.7 billion a month. Google is used on average 23 times a month by every person in Britain. It has got to the point where media buyers cannot afford to exclude Google from their online campaigns by relying on the smaller search engines of Yahoo and Microsoft.

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