wordpress blog stats
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

No relief for Google in EU antitrust case that alleges preferential treatment in search results

The appeal was against a 2017 ruling that held Google guilty of anti-competitive practices in 13 EU countries.

Four years after it was levied and subsequently appealed, the European General Court on November 10 upheld the European Commission's whopping $2.7 billion fine on Google, according to a press release. Google was accused of favourably placing its own comparison shopping service over others, thereby reducing the traffic of competing services. The General Court rejected Google's defense that this happened due to the presence of merchant platforms (online sales platforms like Amazon, eBay) or due to Google's inability to 'provide the equal treatment the commission wanted' on technical and service quality grounds. A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it was too early to comment on whether the tech giant would appeal this decision before the European Court of Justice, the region's top court; although, court documents say an appeal has to be filed within 2 months. Since 2017, Google has reportedly made changes to its policies like allowing rival shopping-comparison sites to bid for ad slots atop Google search results that they can then resell, and changing the format for the ads to get those sites more traffic. Important observations made by the court On anti-competitiveness in comparison shopping market: The court observed that Google's practice was harmful as it diverted a lot of traffic away from third-party services as users mostly look at only the first few results. It also said that given that the search engine reflects the most relevant search results at the top, that its own service showed up at the top hints at an anomaly. It upheld…

Please subscribe/login to read the full story.
Written By

I cover health technology for MediaNama but, really, love all things tech policy. Always willing to chat with a reader! Reach me at anushka@medianama.com

MediaNama’s mission is to help build a digital ecosystem which is open, fair, global and competitive.

Views

News

Is it safe to consider all "publicly available data" as public?

News

PhonePe launched an e-commerce buyer app for ONDC called Pincode. We, however, believe that it should also launch a seller app.

News

Amazon announced that it will integrate its logistics network and SmartCommerce services with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

News

India's smartphone operating system BharOS has received much buzz in the media lately, but does it really merit this attention?

News

After using the Mapples app as his default navigation app for a week, Sarvesh draws a comparison between Google Maps and Mapples

You May Also Like

News

Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...

Advert

135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...

News

By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...

News

Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...

MediaNama is the premier source of information and analysis on Technology Policy in India. More about MediaNama, and contact information, here.

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ

Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Name:*
Your email address:*
*
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ