THE EUROPEAN Commission is conducting a preliminary inquiry into three allegations against internet search giant Google of anti-competitive behaviour.
As Google joined a succession of US IT titans to come under scrutiny by the EU executive’s powerful anti-trust division, it denied doing anything to choke off competition or hurt business partners and users of its service. “We work hard to put our users’ interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments,” it said.
Google said one of the complaints was made by shopping website Ciao! from Bing, a unit of rival group Microsoft, and made a point of saying one of the other complainants, UK price comparison site Foundem, was part of a group partly funded by Microsoft. The other complainant is ejustice.fr, a French legal search engine.
The case comes early in the mandate of newly-installed competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia, a Spaniard who took command of the portfolio only a fortnight ago after five years in charge of the commission’s economics division.
In a statement, Mr Almunia’s office stressed that the EU executive has not “for the time being” opened a formal investigation into the complaints.
“As is usual when the commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations. The commission closely co-operates with other national competition authorities.”
Although Mr Almunia’s spokeswoman declined to say when Google must respond to its queries, preliminary examinations such as in the Google case frequently continue for months.
Google, the world’s dominant search engine company, has come to the attention of anti-trust regulators in the past. However, it has never been subjected to a formal competition investigation.
In a blog posting on its own website, the company said questions about its role in the advertising business and approach to competition were no surprise. “This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company,” said Julia Holtz, senior competition counsel with the company.
Ms Holtz said the Ciao! case was originally taken to German competition regulators before being transferred to Brussels.
Complaints from Ciao! referring to “standard terms and conditions” in Google’s advertising system started after the business was acquired by Microsoft in 2008, she said.
Violation Of Privacy: Court Convicts Internet Search Firm’s Managers
TWO MANAGERS and a former executive of Google have been found guilty of privacy violations by an Italian court, the first such conviction for employees of the world’s most popular internet search engine.
They were on trial on charges related to a clip uploaded to Google Video in 2006 by a group of Turin school students, who filmed themselves bullying an autistic classmate.
Milan judge Oscar Magi ruled today that David Drummond, Googles senior vice president of corporate development and Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel, and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer, were guilty of privacy violations.
They were sentenced to six-month terms, which were suspended. Google said it plans to appeal the “astonishing decision”.
The precedent-setting ruling may have implications for Google elsewhere in Europe, where governments and regulators have sought to curb its overarching reach. In the past year, countries from France to Germany have tried to rein in the company’s dominance in areas from books to maps.
“It is symbolic of the larger problems that Google is facing in Europe with people wanting to do something because they’re so angry and frustrated that Google is so dominant,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco.
“It’s a bad decision. It sets a bad precedent. The individuals didn’t have any control over the private parties involved in the underlying dispute.”
Google says that it removed the video as soon as it was notified and helped Italian police identify those responsible.
The video was in Google’s “funniest videos” category for almost two months, reaching 5,500 views, according to prosecution filings.
“The Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question,” Google said yesterday in a blog posting. – (Bloomberg)
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