European regulators said today that they are investigating complaints filed by three Web companies that contend the US Internet giant Google is not playing fair. The European Commission “can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining,” said a statement from Brussels, spelling out that the probe remains informal at this stage. “As is usual when the commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations,” it added.
Senior Google competition counsel Julia Holtz, via a conference call, said, “we haven’t done anything wrong.” She said said the Internet search giant intends “to respond to each of these separately”, adding that “I believe the commission will like our responses and will decide that there’s nothing to do there.” In a blog yesterday Ms Holtz named the three complainants as British price comparison website Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Microsoft’s Ciao! from Bing.
“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,” she said. Foundem and ejustice.fr expressed concerns that their specialised search engines were being intentionally given low rankings in query results, according to Ms Holtz.
Ciao! was described as a longtime user of Google’s AdSense ad-serving platform that began complaining about the standard terms of the arrangement after the company was bought by rival Microsoft in 2008. A European Commission spokesman refused to say how long Google has to respond to the allegations.
(Source: AFP)
