14 DAY TRIAL // Google is being targeted once again in Europe by companies complaining about the search giant's alleged anti-competitive practices. The latest is a French daily deals site which claims that Google has "illegally" removed the site from its search index and that it blocked it from using its AdSense program.
The company, running the Deal du Jour website, says that Google is doing this in order to prevent it from doing business and to ensure that its own efforts in the space, presumably Google Offers which is only available in a few US cities, succeed.
Google says that it is unaware of the latest complaint to the European Commission's antitrust regulators, Reuters reports, but that the matter is probably related to its AdWords guidelines, implying that the daily deals site may have violated the guidelines resulting in it being kicked off the program.
It's hard to know exactly if there is any base in Deal do Jour's complaint. On the face of it, it does seem that the company may just be trying to find ways to get by, after ban from Google.
Google does not have a daily deals product in France and it is only starting out in the US. It recently acquired The Dealmap, a site which aggregates local deals and displays them in Google Maps, but it is not strictly a daily deals site.
It's hard to determine then what type of competitive advantage would Google gain by blocking one daily deal site, out of the many which operate in the French market.
There are countless other such sites alive and well in the Google index, including Groupon.fr. It is not the first time a small website has made this type of claims against Google.
It seems unlikely Google would risk so much, given how much attention it is facing from regulators already, to gain so little, if anything at all.