Google is bracing itself for a fight, or more likely, a heated round of negotiations with EU regulators, as they're getting close to completing an anti-trust investigation that started more than a year ago.
According to the Financial Times, regulators have a 400 page statement of objections readied for Google. In it, the European Commission addresses all of the complaints that have been filed against Google by European companies.
The case traces itself to
complaints filed by Foundem, eJustice and Ciao (owned by Microsoft), specialized search engines that complained that they didn't rank high enough in Google results.
While other sites in their situation might want to apply some SEO or improve their service, they believed that they were getting bullied by Google who didn't like the competition that these sites posed.
Of course, once the EC started investigating these three claims, more and more sites jumped in complaining that they're being treated unfairly by Google and that the site is not sending enough traffic their way.
Google dominates the search market in most of Europe, in some countries it is the only search engine that counts. So, of course regulators are going to be skeptical of the company. But dominance is not the same thing as abuse.
To date, there has been no hard evidence of Google using its position to wrestle a competitor out of business, let alone gaming its search results to push down obscure search engines.
The main argument against Google is that it's unfair that it uses its search page to include features such as product search which compete with some other sites out there.
The problem lies in the false belief that Google should be 'fair' to all sites and that it should be running a 'neutral' search engine.
The company doesn't actually owe anything to any site and should be able to operate its service any way it wants, not in the least because its 'customers' are not other websites but regular users which are free to determine if a product is useful to them or not.
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