14 DAY TRIAL // It wasn’t long ago that Google was quite optimistic about the proposal it sent to the European Commission in the antitrust case it faced in Europe, but it looks like officials don’t have the same opinion.
Joaquin Almunia, the European competition commissioner, said during an interview for a Spanish radio station that Google’s offer still needed to be improved.
“The latest proposals are not acceptable in the sense that they are not proposals that can eliminate our concerns regarding competition,” said Almunia.
It remains to be seen whether Google’s proposal will be completely binned or the company will have to just make some more amendments.
Google has received harsh criticism over the past years for linking to its own services in search results, while links to rival products and services were placed further down the page. This, the EU said, restricts competition across the Internet.
The company came up with some proposals, although exact details weren’t revealed. However, one comment coming from the same Joaquin Almunia indicates that the EU wants Google to display links to rivals along with a logo next to the URL and in a bigger font, while a brief summary would be displayed to give more information about what the tools are offering.
Temporarily, it’s still Google’s job to come up with changes that it is willing to make. “Within a short timeframe the ball will then be here and then it will be the moment to take decisions,” the commissioner told radio station “Radio Nacional de España.”
This isn’t the first bad news that Google gets today. The Spanish data protection watchdog said that it was fining Google €900,000 ($1.22 million) for collecting and using users’ personal data in an illegal manner.
Google said that it would try to better explain its privacy policy to the Spanish authorities and how that allowed the creation of more effective services.