14 DAY TRIAL // So far, the European Union has looked into Google’s practices quite a few times, most to the company’s annoyance. This time, rumor has it that YouTube could be the next target.
According to Reuters, the antitrust chief of the European Union, Joaquin Almunia, could end up investigating Google’s YouTube if he saw an attempt from the company to abuse the dominant position it has in video searching.
“YouTube for instance, it’s another kind of activity where Google can also leverage their market power in search engine, and maybe this will give way to another investigation,” he suggested, also mentioning that there’d been an increase in complaints about the way Google handled business.
Considering, however, that Microsoft was one of the companies that complained about Google’s search engine practices, we can only assume that for some, this is just an effort to mess with Google because its tools aren’t as popular.
The Internet giant is already under investigation in Europe, although the case is almost closed after the company made a few suggestions that the Commission found appropriate. Almunia said that they could end up extending the ongoing case against the company, but a separate investigation could also be launched to deal with the issue on its own.
This time around, however, it doesn’t seem that YouTube’s issues stem from the way the service handles searching for content, but rather the subscription-based YouTube version that the company is working on.
More specifically, it seems that the European Union has received a complaint from music trade association Impala, which wants the Commission to intervene in a heated row it has with YouTube over the paid streaming music service.
YouTube has been driving a hard bargain, imposing low rates to music labels because it has such as high volume of users, meaning that even at lower rates, it would pay them more than competitors such as Spotify do.
While most labels agreed, a lot of indie labels didn’t and YouTube has been threatening to take down their music from the free YouTube version too because it wouldn’t be fair for the paying customers. Basically, the company says that if you pay for something, you want to have access to all the content people have on the free version and then some, which makes sense from a business point of view. However, it also means that millions upon millions of fans would lose access to a lot of content.
The service is said to launch by the end of summer.