James Delahunty
24 Feb 2010 4:57
The European Commission has set its sights on Google Inc. following a number of complaints alleging that Google unfairly indexes search results in order to bury results from competitors. Google admitted that the European Commission was following up on three complaints made against U.S. giant, and protests its innocence while pledging to cooperate.
"Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners," senior competition counsel Julia Holtz said. "This is not the case."
The complaints were made against Google by Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing, eJustice.fr (a French legal search engine) and Foundem, a British price comparison website. Google has said it is confident that its operations conform to competition laws in the European Union.
Ciao! was a longtime user of Google's Adsense platform, and began to raise complaints about the terms of the arrangement when Microsoft bought it out in 2008. "We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market," Holtz said.
eJustice.fr and Foundem take issue with how Google indexes results from their websites. Both have expressed concerns that their search services were intentionally given low rankings for query results.