Google may face antitrust lawsuit in the US due to the featured search of its own services

While the European Commission is dealing with an antitrust case on Google in the local markets, the same senators from Washington are trying to repeat the same thing. During the last Senate hearings, Congressman Richard Blumenthal appealed to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to pay attention to the Google search results.

The search giant always shows its own services, which are sometimes even indirectly related to the search query, in the first positions, actually breaking the conditions of fair competition in the market. The idea of ​​Blumenthal was also supported by the consile’s Prosecutor General of New York, as well as former FTC adviser Tim Wu. In his opinion, Google is wrong in the case of such general search queries as weather information and other similar ones.
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“In some areas, Google is manipulating accessible resources, preventing fair competition. It seems to me that at the moment Google is taking a completely different position on this issue, and this became especially evident after the FTC closed the investigation to Google, ”said Tim Wu.

The investigation of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was completed in 2013 - at that time, even Tim Wu had a different opinion and supported the search giant. Over time, his opinion completely changed, and first of all it was influenced by a published study of analysts of the Yelp service.



Republican Senator Orrin Hatch similarly discussed a similar question regarding Google, along with FTC head Edith Ramirez. A potential discussion of a problem in the market was rejected for political reasons.

If Google has a confident position on market competition in the US, this can quickly change after a lawsuit with the European Commission. One of the representatives of the European Union Anti-Monopoly Commission, Margaret Vestaiger, is about to hold a series of meetings in Washington as part of an investigation against Google. Sources say that during his visit to the United States, Margaret is not going to make any accusations against Google and is only going to deal with collecting additional information on the case.

But if the additional information can confirm the charges of the European Commission, then Google may face a new antitrust lawsuit in the US, the total amount of the fine for which could potentially exceed tens of millions of dollars.