The European Union today announced that they will be launching a preliminary anti-trust investigation into alleged down-ranking of competitors on Google Inc. search results – as well as deliberate preferential treatment for Google products.
The investigation has been brought on by complaints primarily from Microsoft Corp., who developed the Bing search engine – Google’s chief competitor in the search market – and Foundem, a U.K.-based price-comparison portal. Google is facing a similar ongoing investigation in the United States and it seems the European Union has now sensed the time is right to jump in.
The specific wording of the complaint alleges that Google “lowers the ranking” of competitors to “shut out competing services.” Most reasonable minded people would think that it is perfectly acceptable to favour your own products over those of competitors, unfortunately for Google they have now reached a level of ubiquity that requires them, by law, to give their competitors equal footing within their results.
A few years ago Microsoft suffered the same fate with Internet Explorer – competing browsers successfully argued that Microsoft was using the ubiquity of Windows to lock people into using IE – only those tech-savvy enough to install an alternative browser had a choice. This has led to the infamous “Browser Selection” prompt that appears on any fresh install of Windows within the EU, offering alternatives to Internet Explorer.
It should be pointed out that this is only a preliminary investigation designed to establish if indeed there is cause for an anti-trust case against Google – they’re not in trouble just yet.
Google, for their part, have responded with a subtle dig at Facebook (emphasis ours):
“Since we started Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry, ensuring that ads are always clearly marked, making it easy for users to take their data with them when they switch services and investing heavily in open source projects, but there’s always going to be room for improvement, and so we’ll be working with the Commission to address any concerns.”
