A war of words has erupted between News Corp and Google, amidst a renewed EU examination of the Web giant's search practices.

Joaquín Almunia, commission vice president in charge of competition policy, last week re-opened a case against Google following negative feedback from the company's rivals.

Among the criticism: A letter from News Corp CEO Robert Thomson to European Commission vice president Almunia, accusing Google of being "a platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks."

Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate counts major global news entities like the U.K.'s Times and Sun papers among its own, as well as The Wall Street Journal, book publisher HarperCollins, and the Fox Entertainment Group.

But the New York-based organization, which made headlines three years ago in a phone hacking scandal, has turned its attention to Google. The strongly worded letter, dated Sept. 8 but released this week, calls out the company for being "a vast, powerful, often unaccountable bureaucracy" willing to "exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition."

Claims like those are exactly what Almunia is investigating in his re-examination of a deal announced in February.

The EU declined to comment on the situation.

Google, however, returned News Corp's heated volley with a simple statement of its own: "Phew! What a scorcher! Murdoch accuses Google of eating his hamster!"

Alongside the light-hearted response—ripped straight from a 1989 Sun newspaper headline—the tech giant pointed PCMag toward a Sept. 6 blog post by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

In the post, Schmidt defends his company against accusations, saying that "it's not the case that Google is 'the gateway to the Internet' … Nor is it true to say that we are promoting our own products at the expense of the competition."

Thomson disagreed, writing in his letter that "virtually every newspaper in Europe is in the midst of an upheaval," leaving many in danger of extinction. In part, he said, because of their own flawed strategies and lack of leadership. But also "because the value of serious content has been commodified by Google."

News Corp declined to comment beyond Thomson's letter.

This is not the first time Murdoch has tangled with Google, though. In 2009, he threatened to pull his publications from Google News because he was more interested in finding loyal readers than Internet traffic. A year later, he said "we are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing ... There is a law of copyright and they recognize it."

By 2012, he'd joined Twitter, and took Google to task for being a "piracy leader."