Google is the world’s leading web search company, with a huge global share of all searches. In Europe it controls 80 percent of the search market. But for the past five years, Google has been driving into legal roadblocks in the European Union, erected to try to reign in the search giant’s influence. The European Union recently rejected a settlement from Google to settle its antitrust complaints.
Google has of course expanded far beyond its core search market: it provides a wide range of other products including email, an office suite, cloud storage, music streaming, the wildly successful Android operating system and the much reviled social network, Google+. Competitors claim that Google is using its monopoly in search to try securing monopolies in these other markets. Specifically, they claim that Google places its own products higher in search results, and sometimes places “cards” of its own services ahead of links to services offered by others. For instance, when searching for a stock, a card with information from Google’s stock database is shown above all the search results, to the disadvantage of stock information websites everywhere. If Google is proven to be abusing its search monopoly, it would be a breach of EU antitrust law, meaning that Google would have to pay a fine equal to 10 percent of its annual revenue.
Google has offered placing competitors’ products higher on search results, but to no avail. The EU has rejected Google’s current attempt at settlement. In fact, the recent pitch was Google’s third. EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia stated in an interview with Bloomberg that he is “trying to extract” better terms of agreement. Margrethe Vestager, who will succeed Almunia this November, has claimed that anti-trust investigations of Google will continue. The EU may also start probing the effects of other Google products on the market.
Some officials in the Union demand further concessions. Energy chief Guenther Oettinger has stated that Google should come under tighter regulation to ensure objectivity in search results. Exactly how the EU will measure ‘objectivity’ of search is yet to be seen. For instance, Google’s current system of counting links is vulnerable to search-engine-optimizers. In addition, whenever Google changes their search algorithms, small websites struggle as their search rankings suddenly shift.
This is not Google’s only conflict with the EU. There have also been calls for Google to implement a “right to be forgotten,” wherein individuals can apply to have their personal data removed from Google searches. While this may constitute hiding information from the public, it is also supposed to help people continue their lives without being stigmatized for events in the past. In a separate incident, German newspapers have complained that Google is summarizing their articles, and a regional regulator has called for Google to limit its cross-analysis of customers. Ultimately, so long as Google holds the lion’s share of the search market its legal scuffles may never cease.
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