14 DAY TRIAL // As it was bound to happen eventually, Google is now under anti-trust investigation in Europe after three separate companies have filed a complaint alleging that Google's size is hurting their businesses and that the search giant was abusing its position and competing unfairly. The three companies going against Google are a UK product-search and price-comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine, ejustice.fr, and Ciao, an online shopping site owned by Microsoft.
"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. This is not the case. We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments," Julia Holtz, senior competition counsel at Google, explained the company's position.
It's not the first time we've heard of these companies and their complaints about Google and their allegations were mostly debunked previously. Still, they managed to push the matter and get it in front of the European Commission, which will now look into it.
The allegations are slightly different, depending on the company from which they originate. For Ciao, it's pretty open and shut. The site had a business deal with Google before being acquired by Microsoft, specifically, it ran ads from Google's AdSense network. After the acquisition, though, the site has discovered issues with the way Google does business and has taken its complaint first to the local regulators and now to the EC.
For Foundem, the issue is even more straightforward. The company complains that Google is unfairly lowering the site's ranking in the search results because it offers a product competing with Google's own. Now, ignoring the fact that a small UK site believing it is an actual competitor to Google is more than a bit of wishful thinking, the fact is, there is a perfectly good explanation to why Foundem is ranking badly, it's a poor-quality site that tramples over most SEO principles out there, as eConsultancy does a very good job at explaining.
Finally, ejustice.fr has arguments very similar to those of Foundem, it believes that Google is unfairly competing with it. Again, this is the world's largest search engine dominating clearly worldwide versus a very small and niche search engine. Google doesn't need any help in 'competing' with it and it's not going to resort to shady practices for a non-threat. In all likelihood, the European Commission, despite its usual hard stance on anti-trust issues, especially when large US companies are involved, will dismiss the claims as baseless, though it will be interesting to see what the investigation uncovers.