Google will on Tuesday argue that publishers such as Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press should be allowed to merge, because of the competition they face from the search engine giant and other internet companies.

A Google submission to the Office of Fair Trading will say that the competition authority should relax existing rules that have prevented a coming together of any two of the “big four” publishers — whose ranks also include Daily Mail and General Trust and Gannett’s Newsquest.

In the letter, Matt Brittin, the managing director of Google UK, said: “Google supports the position of many newspapers for the need to allow for a 21st century merger regime, allowing local and regional news services to merge and consolidate in order to create...competitive news offerings”.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is currently reviewing the existing newspaper merger framework as part of the wider Digital Britain white paper being prepared by Lord Carter of Barnes — prompting hopes that further consolidation amongst publishers will be able to take place.

Google’s intervention comes on the day co-founder Larry Page and chief executive Eric Schmidt come to Britain to answer questions at the company’s Zeitgeist conference, which will also feature a speech from Prince Charles and an appearance by Sir Richard Branson.

The search engine is also the subject of complaints that it is stealing newspaper advertising and making the news business increasingly uneconomic, exacerbating the impact of the recession. In the US, the company is testing the sale of advertising on its Google News service, which links to content generated by news providers.

Mr Brittin acknowledged broadly that newspaper owners now had to deal with the fact that “competition for consumer attention and for advertising revenue has intensified in recent years and the internet has further accelerated the change” — code for saying that local businesses now could choose whether to advertise on local papers or a website.

Roger Parry, chairman of the publishers’ Local Media Alliance, which is calling for a relaxation of the rules, said that “web pioneers like Google have changed the rules of the game” and it was “very reassuring to have the case for a new regime supported by the game changer in chief”.

Historically, the OFT has assumed that local and regional newspapers only competed with each other, ignoring the impact of Google or any other websites, such as Auto Trader, Rightmove or Monster. That meant that it has rejected mergers which would reduce the number of newspaper owners in a city or region.

Slough was decreed by the OFT to be “a substantial part of the UK” last year, and as a result the planned consolidation of the Slough, Eton and Langley Observer with Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead Express titles under the ownership of the family owned Dunfermline Press was blocked.

That ruling so frustrated regional newspaper groups that they have been lobbying for a relaxation in the merger guidance given by the OFT. They believe that the ruling prevents any consolidation between any of the big four publishers, or even smaller scale “swap deals” where publishers would exchange titles of greater value to other group because they can extract local cost-savings.

However, Becket McGrath, a competition lawyer with Berwin Leighton Paisner, warned that expectations of a relaxation were being set too high. “The problem is that people do not understand how the OFT works; it can’t make broad statements as to how a market works. It might say it is prepared to take the internet into account, but in the end it will always decide on a case by case basis as to whether mergers should be allowed”.

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