Almunia offers Google a chance to settle antitrust violation

Google, which has dominated the European market over 90% for search engines, has a little time to radically change strategy and allay the concerns raised in the European Commission for abuse of dominant position.

The ultimatum has been raised by Joaquin Almunia, Commissioner for Competition, who wants willingness to compromise from the US giants. If Google will fail to follow the rules, the Commission will trigger a process that may lead
to a penalty of 10% of the turnover of the company, expected to be (29,700 million Euros).

Brussels opened an investigation into how Google work for a year and a half, in November 2010, at the request of three companies, including Microsoft. They have all claimed damages for the aggressive practices from Google.

Almunia believes that the complaints are unfounded and clearly identified, particularly in four areas; it was announced yesterday in Brussels.

The first is how Google presents the results of their searches, giving preference to those made by their own searching and displaying those results differently as compared to the other search engines.

Almunia also believe that Google copies the contents of competition by using feedback from users and using that material in their own websites without prior authorization. Finally, the Commissioner is concerned that Google puts
restrictions on the migration of advertising campaigns from AdWords platform to competition.

Almunia revealed that he has sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s president, pointing out the four objections.

"In this letter I have offered Google to give us answers or solutions for each one of the problems within few weeks”, said the official European competition, who said he wants to avoid the formal opening of a disciplinary procedure.

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Posted by Farasat Ali on May 22 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry