#A fresh sign of Google’s excessive power

For a purely online publication, it’s a death threat: Google is warning two sites, ZeroHedge and The Federalist, that it will cut them off from Google Ads revenue because of reader posts in their comments sections.

Since Google controls a huge chunk of all Web advertising, this means almost no revenues at all. That’s an enormous amount of power for one company, making it easy to see why there’s so much noise about the need for federal antitrust action against it.

Google’s approach seems antithetical to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says Web sites don’t count as publishers of information provided by others. That rule shields Google itself from lawsuits over content it links to — how can it insist on holding others to a higher standard?

The company says its policies “prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing” — but its tech geniuses can surely just ensure that ads don’t appear in any comments sections. (Advertisers surely don’t want to be there, anyway.)

This is particularly egregious because both “violators” were brought to Google’s attention by an NBC reporter pushing claims from left-wing nonprofits — a reporter who couldn’t get her own facts right.

Adele-Momoko Fraser’s account Tuesday afternoon for NBC said Google had already cut off both sites, and because they’d published “articles pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests.” In fact, Google told The Post’s Nicholas Vega only ZeroHedge is banned, and that the issue is purely its comments sections.

Fraser’s “facts” painted Google as utterly in the pocket of the far left, but the truth is still appalling. If Google doesn’t rethink this policy, it’s begging for the feds to crack down.