European Commission launches Google review as part of antitrust investigation

    Today, the main antimonopoly agency of the European Union has begun a check on the fact of complaints from several search companies regarding "an unfavorable interpretation of their services in Google’s paid and free search results," the European Commission said in a statement .

    Recall that the antitrust investigation of the European Union against Google started in February 2010 . It was initiated by the German search engine Ciao, the French legal search engine EJustice.fr, as well as the British trade search engine Foundem. Foundem, for example, claims that the defendant has special filters to underestimate Foundem in search results.

    Ciao is owned by Microsoft, and Foundem is a member of ICOMP, partly funded by Microsoft.

    The European Commission will check Google onfour charges .
    1. Google dishonestly uses its dominant position in the search market by promoting its vertical search or price comparison service at the expense of competitors. (Google has already answered these allegations: the company believes that the preferred position of its own services in search results is not intentional, but is related to objective indicators, that is, the algorithms themselves choose a result that is more suitable for the user's requests. According to Foundem, they underestimate them intentionally) .
    2. Google underestimates the “quality score” for contextual search advertising competing vertical search engines.
    3. Google imposes unfair bans on advertisers by prohibiting certain types of advertisements from competing services. (Google replies that they stopped this practice about two years ago).
    4. Google imposes restrictions on the portability of data collected during advertising campaigns of competing search platforms. (Google replies that it provides the ability to export information, although there are some restrictions for advertising agencies, but not for advertisers).
    In general, in essence of all the accusations, Google does not agree with the fact that it has a “dominant position” in the online search market, although the market share is really large.

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