Google Inc. has been facing harsh antitrust accusations in the European Union for several years, and today Kent Walker, senior vice president and general counsel at Google, issued a strongly worded rejection of the EU’s claims, calling them “wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics.”

The European Commission has had its eye on Google’s business practices for a number of years, but it filed its first formal complaint against the company in April. In a Statement of Objections, the Commission criticized Google’s Android licensing practices, which push for Google to be the default search engine installed on Android devices. In July, the Commission added complaints about its AdSense advertising system, accusing Google of intentionally ranking its own results higher than those of competitors. In his new post, Walker rejected these claims, using Amazon.com Inc. as an example of a competitor that was not considered in the Commission’s complaints..

“The Commission’s original SO drew such a narrow definition around online shopping services that it even excluded services like Amazon,” Walker said. “It claimed that when we offered improved shopping ads to our users and advertisers, we were ‘favouring’ our own services — and that this was bad for a handful of price comparison aggregators who claimed to have lost clicks from Google. But it failed to take into account the competitive significance of companies like Amazon and the broader dynamics of online shopping.”

Walker pointed to a statistic that a third of online purchases in Germany start on Amazon, compared with 14.3 percent that start on Google. He also pointed to the success of both Amazon and eBay as examples of strong competition in Europe.

“Red herrings”

Foundem, a U.K.-based price comparison site and one of the original complainants in the antitrust case against Google, rejected the search giant’s use of e-commerce sites as examples of healthy competition.

“Unfortunately for Google, its continuing protestations about the flourishing fortunes of Amazon and eBay remain the red herrings they have always been,” Foundem said in a statement cited by Ars Technica. “Google does not (yet) have an eCommerce, auction, or merchant-platform service that competes with Amazon or eBay. Therefore, Google does not (yet) have any incentive to anti-competitively penalise Amazon or eBay in its natural search results, and it does not (yet) have any competing service of its own to anti-competitively favour.”

Walker did not address the European Commission’s complaints against Google’s licensing practices with Android, but he noted that Google will be releasing a separate blog post on that subject in the coming days.

“We’re confident these cases will ultimately be decided based on the facts and that this analysis will show our product innovations have benefited consumers and merchants, and expanded competition,” Walker concluded in his post. “The surest signs of dynamic competition in any market are low prices, abundant choices, and constant innovation — and that’s a great description of shopping on the internet today.”

Depending on the Commission’s decision, Google could face some hefty fines in Europe, potentially adding up to billions of euros.

Photo credit: Eoghan OLionnain Berlaymont via photopin (license)