14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the conflict between the European Union and Google is far from ending. Although there has not been much news about the issue lately, which made people think that they might have reached an agreement, recent reports show the exact contrary.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe is preparing the ground to sue the tech giant for having manipulated search results in its favor to the detriment of smaller companies.
The European Union is very strict about this type of things, and this might be one of the reasons why it keeps rejecting Google’s offers to reach a settlement in this case.
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The Wall Street Journal revealed that Margrethe Vestager, the EU's new antitrust chief, “is planning to move the case forward in a relatively short time frame,” which means that the European Union is very likely to choose to take legal actions rather than resolve the dispute amicably.
It was reported that the European Commission is trying to raise some evidence against Google by asking the companies which filed the complaints against Google to allow them to make these documents available for the public eye.
Despite Google’s denial of having used any sort of anticompetitive tactics to promote its own products or the ones of bigger companies who had paid for the services, it would seem that the European Union has no intention of backing down.
Given that Google has the monopoly over web searches in Europe with more than 90 percent of the search market, it comes as no surprise that the European Commission won't give up so easily.
This means that we should be expecting a legal process anytime soon. Even more companies could come forward to testify against Google for making use of its control over the search market.
Shopping sites, in particular, have accused Google of controlling the market given that when their customers try to look for their products online using the Google search engine, they only get results from bigger companies or from Google itself, while their sites appear at the very bottom.