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European Commission opens Google antitrust probe

01 December 2010 08:31 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google Inc., setting up what could be the first major test of whether the online search giant abuses its dominance to enrich itself and elbow out rivals, San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The panel in Brussels, which represents the 27 nations in the European Union, said it will explore a number of specific allegations by competitors. If they are found true, it would show a pattern of Google exploiting its market power to bolster its advertising business and quash competition in other online services.

The commission’s move follows years of growing scrutiny of Google’s business practices among rivals, public policy groups and governments, but there have been few concrete actions among U.S. regulators.

Among the allegations the commission will examine:

-Google lowered the ranking of unpaid search results for businesses that offer competing online products - such as price comparisons for shoppers - while positioning its own services prominently on the page.

-It took measures that forced rivals to pay higher prices to advertise such services on the search site.

-The company attempted to prevent its advertisers from working with competing search and advertising companies by imposing exclusivity obligations and restricting the portability of advertising-campaign data.

Google addressed the complaints point by point in an e-mail to The Chronicle, saying that advertisers can export their campaigns to other platforms and that it doesn’t impose any exclusivity obligations. Some sites rank poorly in search results and some advertisers have to pay more, but it’s because they’ve proved to be less relevant or of lower quality than others, it added.