Italy seems to be starting to worry about the Google monopoly. Someone in the country sees it as becoming as bad as the hold that Berlusconi has over the press there.

Actually, the only reason that Berlusconi hasn’t faced anti-trust convictions is because he’s Italian and his attorneys knew how to slow up a court case until it was ruled “out of time”. However, the search giant hasn’t been that lucky and has already fallen foul of the local court system.

With the court case between YouTube for using stolen Berlusconi telly material dragging on, it looks like the Italian anti-trust regulators are going to snap at Google’s rump. The country’s antitrust chief named Giovanni Pitruzzella claimed he was worried that the search engine risks becoming a publishing monopoly in the nearest future. This wouldn’t be a problem but as it is antitrust legislation seems to apply to neither Google nor Facebook.

Giovanni Pitruzzella wants to change the legislation in the country so that social networks should be subject to antitrust limits, and he is able to salvage the Italian debt crisis by fining the search giant. The local media reported that Pitruzzella told the country’s lower house of Parliament that antitrust regulation should extend to online media including social networks. He said that social networks were competing with traditional publishing entities for advertising revenues. In case Google gets too much control, the newspapers which the country knows and loves will be toast.

In other words, the ancient tradition of writing copy on behalf of the major political parties will cease to exist and they won’t any longer be able to be used to knife rivals by showing them leaked papers about alleged corruption. Giovanni Pitruzzella believes there’s a lack of proper rules dealing with electronic commerce, and it’s likely to marginalize the publishing industry.

In fact, the local digital advertising market is now limited by competition from the international members of the web. Giovanni Pitruzzella believes control of the search giant and other social media monopolies like Facebook should be included in any Integrated Communications System.

Meanwhile, Franco Bernabe, the president of Telecom Italy, was pleased that there was recognition that people working online have assumed this can pose significant risks to competition.