The European Union charged Google with violating antitrust laws and operating as a virtual monopoly for online searches.
EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager announced Wednesday the search engine giant would be charged for suppressing market competition, harming European customers.
“I am concerned that the company has given an unfair advantage to its own comparison shopping service, in breach of EU antitrust rules,” said Vestager, EU’s competition commissioner. “If the investigation confirmed our concerns, Google would have to face the legal consequences and change the way it does business in Europe.”
The European Commission investigated Google’s business practices amid concerns the internet company had too much stake in the search engine market, and altered web searches by favoring links to its own shopping service and diverting traffic from other online merchants.
The five-year probe confirmed those suspicions, and has spurred a separate EU investigation into Google’s Android software, and whether it unduly influences smartphone manufacturers to favor its apps and services.
Google denied all of the EU’s accusations. “While Google may be the most used search engine, people can now find and access information in numerous different ways — and allegations of harm, for consumers and competitors, have proved to be wide of the mark,” Google senior vice president, Amit Singhal wrote in a blog post responding to the EU’s announcement.
“Indeed if you look at shopping — an area where we have seen a lot of complaints and where the European Commission has focused in its Statement of Objections — it’s clear that (a) there’s a ton of competition (including from Amazon and eBay, two of the biggest shopping sites in the world) and (b) Google’s shopping results have not the harmed the competition.”
The Commission regulates antitrust issues across the continent and has the power to keep worldwide companies, such as Google and Facebook, in check if they penetrate too much of the online market. If found guilty of wrongdoing, Google could face fines up to 10 percent of its annual sales and potentially force the company to restructure its business model, a consequence that would reverberate through the tech world.
The Commission has a track record of aggressively pursuing global tech companies that may limit customers’ options for computer services or products. Microsoft lost a similar lawsuit in 2007 and had to pay $670 million in fines and change its Windows package to make it more compatible with other systems. In 2009, Intel was fined $1.45 billion for stifling competition and limiting customers’ options by giving several computer manufacturers rebates in exchange for exclusively purchasing the company’s microchips.