Antitrust officials who investigated into Google’s search practices have given the giant search engine a few weeks to come up with remedies to resolve their concerns. In case they fail to do so, they are at a risk of being formally charged for the same and may have to pay a heavy fine. This investigation could have an impact on the probe by the US Federal Trade Commission.
The investigation reveals that Google has been found favouring their own travel reviews and maps and other services by displaying their links over the sites of their competitors. This favouritism could negatively impact their competitors, as pointed out by the VP of EU for competition policy, Joaquin Almunia. Google has also been found copying the reviews put up by users on their competitor’s sites, therefore making the competitor’s efforts rather pointless when it comes to investing on content which is original.
Apart from this, Google has also been accused of shutting away the advertisements by competitors while making sure that applying their own ad services on other platforms becomes difficult. Google is expected to clear these doubts soon. However, they did not comment on the issue at hand. Similar to the investigation conducted by the EU, the US FTC has also hired a famous lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, to investigate into Google’s case.
Google has grown from being just a giant search engine to offering more specific services too. However, competitors are of the opinion that Google has been using its dominance as a search engine to increase the traffic towards its other products. Like in this particular case, everytime a users searches up an address on Google, a link leading him to Google Maps pops up right in the start. As a result, other competitors lose their chance to draw traffic to their sites and fail to compete with Google.
Foundem, which is a shopping search site, believes that Google should exercise its powers in the market responsibly, by playing fairly in a way that it encourages innovation and protects competition in the market. They have gone ahead and filed a complaint concerning the matter against Google, initiating investigation. In Google’s defense, the company’s intention is to only offer the best alternatives to its users through the search results and co-incidentally in some cases, these alternatives are products by Google.
