The European Commission began to check Google in the framework of the antitrust investigation

Today, the main antitrust department of the European Union has begun to check on the fact of complaints of several search companies about the “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 shopping search engine Foundem. Foundem, for example, claims that the defendant has special filters for lowering Foundem in search results.

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

The European Commission will check Google on four charges .

1. Google unfairly uses its dominant position in the search market, promoting its vertical search or price comparison service at the expense of competitors. (Google has already responded to 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 the result that is more appropriate to the user's requests. According to Foundem, they are underestimated) .
2. Google underestimates the “quality score” for contextual search advertising competing vertical search engines.
3. Google imposes unfair bans on advertisers, prohibiting the placement of certain types of advertising of competing services. (Google responds that they stopped this practice about two years ago).
4. Google places restrictions on the portability of data collected during ad campaigns of competing search platforms. (Google answers that it provides the ability to export information, although there are some restrictions for advertising agencies, but not for advertisers).

And in general, in fact, of all the allegations, Google disagrees with the fact that it has a “dominant position” in the online search market, although the market share is indeed large.