EU Asks Google About Anti-competitve Allegations
The EU has received complaints from U.S. search giant, Google, and could launch an anti-trust investigation into the company.
Google today revealed that it has been contacted by the European Commission which says it has received three complaints about Google, one each from Foundem, a UK price comparison site, ejustice.fr, a French legal search engine, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing.
Google's Senior Competition Counsel, Julia Holtz today blogged about the complaints and pointing out that that Foundem is a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft. Foundem claims argues that Google's algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. Holtz says ejustice.fr's complaint "seems to echo these concerns."
Regarding Ciao!, Google says they were a long-time AdSense partner. In fact, according to Holtz, Google and Ciao! enjoyed a good relationship until the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. "We started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels," said Holtz.
Holtz maintains that Google has done nothing wrong and says, "Our search is not perfect, but it's a very hard computer science problem to crack."
At the time of writing, the EU had yet to announce any formal investigation.
"The commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being," the EU said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg. "As is usual when the commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations."
- EU ,
- Commission ,
- Google ,
- Anti-Competition
- Intel: We Were Hacked Too
- BioShock 2 PC Widescreen Bug Fixed
- John Carmack Gets Lifetime Achievement Award
- Nvidia Releases GeForce GT 300 OEM Series Bump
- Lenovo Says Customers Don't Want Slate/Tablets
- Habey's Small Atom-Based PC is Fanless
- MSI's All-in-1 Has 3D, Core i7, Full HD 120Hz LED
- Nvidia to Unleash 'Fermi' GF100 on March 26
- FTC Warns 100 Organizations of Data Breaches
- Valve's Steam Ditches Internet Explorer for WebKit
- Windows 7 Anti-Piracy Update Now Live
- LG 1st To Get Official Win 7 Touch Certification
- Just Cause for Upgrading to Vista, 7 for DirectX 10
- SanDisk Shipping New G3 SSD With ExtremeFFS
- Activision's Blur Allows You to Tweet and Drive
- ATI Radeon HD 5830 Fills Price/Performance Gap
- Microsoft's "Spy Guide" Handbook Leaked Online
- Star Wars Lightsabers in USB Flash Drive Form
from? You mean "about" right? I don't think Google complained about it's own practices somehow...
You can't complain that your site doesn't appear on somebody elses. Period. They provide a service, and nowhere does it say that they include every site.
Now, your site IS on Google, and you're complaining that it's not ranked high enough?
Shut up.
From the sound of it the reason to knock things down in the search order might be a valid one (e.g. results for that site are more likely to be showing more links to what was searched for rather than what was actually searched for).
In principle though, they could discriminate anti-competitively (e.g. if you pay to use Bing placed adverts then Google would not show you as often / high)so it's good that people are prepared to check. Hopefully there's nothing wrong and the checking will show that.
um.... It's most likely that it's because Im not bright enough to understand the issues here.... How has google behaved anti-competitively? It's not like the case with Microsoft's IE integration in the OS, or Intel's anti-competitive behaviour, is it???