The
European Commission has sent two further Statements of Objections to Google. In
a supplementary Statement of Objections, the Commission has supported its
preliminary conclusion that Google has abused its dominant position by
systematically favouring its comparison shopping service in its search result
pages.
In a separate
set of objections, the Commission has set out its preliminary view that Google has
abused its dominant position by artificially restricting the possibility of
third party websites to display search advertisements from Google's
competitors.
EU Commissioner Vestager has stated that Google has
developed “incredible and innovative products” but that this does not give it
the right to deny others the opportunity to innovate and compete.
In the shopping comparison search case the
Commission has rejected Google’s argument that websites such as Amazon and eBay
compete with Google’s shopping service and it views these players more as
customers than competitors. Commissioner
Vestager maintains that even if the Commission accepted Google’s market
definition, its practices would still have restricted competition.
In the new advertising objections the Commission
claims that Google has an 80 per cent share of the EEA search advertising market
through its AdSense platform. The
Commission is concerned that Google has restricted how third parties obtain and
use advertising from its competitors through a range of practices: requiring third
parties not to source search ads from Google's competitors; requiring third
parties to take a minimum number of search ads from Google and reserve the most
prominent space on their search results pages to Google search ads; and
requiring third parties to obtain Google's approval before making any change to
the display of competing search ads.
The Commission has not provided a timeline for
conclusion of these cases.
No comments:
Post a Comment