The European country went against Google's global dominance

Apr 20, 2015 07:10 GMT  ·  By

Despite the fact that that the European Union has formally filed antitrust charges against Google, it seems that European countries are also leading independent battles against the company for abusing its marketing position.

Le Figaro revealed that France is looking into ways to prevent the American giant from exercising its monopoly on search by forcing it into disclosing its search algorithm.

It was revealed that that House of Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment to a bill which states that search engines should not only show three more rival companies on their homepage, but also reveal their search algorithms to their users in order to ensure the fairness of the searches.

The amendment to what is known as the Macron rule is apparently directed towards Google, given that the tech company has monopoly over more than 90 percent of the search engine market.

Although it met some opposition, the amendment has gone through

Put forward by Catherine Morin-Desailly, a well-known member of the Senate of France, this amendment wants search engines to explain clearly to its users how the results of the search have been referenced to them.

"The French senate is likely to adopt a bill this week which would allow the country’s national telecoms regulator to monitor search engines’ algorithms, with sweeping powers to ensure its results are fair and non-discriminatory," Financial Times had reported earlier on the matter.

In France, in the event of non-compliance with the new regulations, companies may have to withstand penalties of up to 10% of global turnover.

Furthermore, the Senate also adopted another amendment to the above-specified law which states that one of the three rivals that the search engine has to display in the homepage should be located in France.

Although the Minister of the Economy, Emmanuel Macron, strongly objected to this amendment stating that the issue was already handled at international level by the European Commission, Catherine Morin-Desailly retorted that the European procedures is rather slow and that it was urgent to for them to take action in light of the unfavorable consequences that Google search dominance had had over their companies.

This decision to pass the amended bill comes shortly after the European Commission's decision to file the lawsuit against Google after more than five years of investigations over Internet search abuse, a lawsuit which, if won, could divest the company of billions of dollars.