EU Extends Market Testing of Google’s Anti-Trust Proposal
It was presumed last month that the European Commission was ready to accept Google’s anti-trust proposal, but we’re closing in on June and the proposal has yet to be confirmed.
According to the EU, the proposal submitted is still under ‘market test’. And on what should have been the last day for testing, it was announced that the testing will be extended until the end of June.
“This market test should have been concluded yesterday, but at the request of some participants we have decided to prolong [by] one month the market test, so at the end of June we will receive the answers,” EU Commissioner Joaquín Almunia said in the European Parliament. “After we will analyze the responses…we will ask Google probably, I can’t anticipate this formally but almost 100%, we will ask Google to improve the proposals.”
Google is under investigation for its practices regarding search results. Competitors have been complaining that Google has been putting them farther down the search results page, and putting its own products and services up top.
Google submitted a proposal that addresses the four concerns of its competitor, namely prioritizing its own products and services in search results, the way it displayed results of competitors, while the third and fourth are addressed with “exclusivity agreements for the delivery of Google search advertisements on other websites and restrictions in the portability of AdWords advertising campaigns.”
Foundem, one of the companies who complained about Google’s practices, stated that what Google proposed was just going to make the problem worse, and will “kill any hope of re-establishing the level playing field on which competition, innovation, and consumer choice depends.”
Another entity in this probe is FairSeach.org which is comprised of Google competitors such as Microsoft and Nokia who stated that Google’s unfair practices extends to Android, stating that Google is using the mobile platform to monopolize the mobile marketplace and the coalition filed a separate claim regarding this.
“We have received a formal complaint regarding some aspects of the Android ecosystem,” Almunia said at the hearing before the European Parliament. “We haven’t decided if we will open or not a formal investigation.”
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