Even as India deliberates on the anti-competitive charges against Google, we take a look at other similar cases that Google is facing or has faced in the past.
Google is facing a probe by the Competition Commission of India into alleged anti-competitive practices. The CCI will soon begin final hearings in the case. According to a PTI report, while there was no official word on the contents of the probe report, it believed to contain comments and inputs from a host of entities present in the Internet business including some well-known e-commerce firms and web portals.
While submissions from some of them appear to suggest violations on part of Google, others have sided with the US-based global giant. Even as India deliberates on the anti-competitive charges against Google, we take a look at other similar cases that Google is facing or has faced in the past.
Google anti-trust charges in European Union
In April 2015, European Union’s Competition Commission charged Google with violating its dominant position in the market and said it gave “systematic favourable treatment” to its own Google Shopping in its results. Additionally, EU is also examining Google’s online ad business and has launched a separate probe against Android. An Associated Press report quoted Margrethe Vestager, EU’s competition commissioner, as saying, “It is not based on the merits of Google Shopping that Google Shopping always comes up first…Dominant companies have a responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position.” On Android, the charge is that Google is obstructing rival operating systems, apps and services by pushing its own services as dominant ones on mobiles. If found guilty, Google can be fined 10 per cent of its earnings or nearly $6 billion.
On August 27, Google responded to the allegations saying the commission’s conclusions were “wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics”. Google Senior Vice President Kent Walker said in a blog post that the commission did not back up its charge that the search giant “diverted” traffic away from other shopping services. Walker added in his post, “Economic data spanning more than a decade, an array of documents, and statements from complainants all confirm that product search is robustly competitive”.
Google also criticised the Commission for asking that the search engine should “show ads sourced and ranked by other companies” in their advertising space, a move that Google says will “harm the quality and relevance of our results”. The EU competition case is still under way. In a recent development, Getty Images also joined the list of companies against Google and filed a complaint to EU antitrust regulators. Getty said that Google was favouring its own images service in its search results.
Google-US FTC case
In the US, Google faced anti-competitive charges from 2011. However in 2013, the company emerged unscathed after a lengthy investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Business review website Yelp had lodged a complaint against Google over ‘scraping’ of their content, which had started the whole FTC investigation in 2011. In January 2013, Google signed a consent decree with the FTC which required the company to charge “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” prices to license patents needed for smartphones, tablets, etc; the search giant also promised to exclude snippets copied from other websites in its search results.
As part of the FTC deal, Google also said it would adjust its online advertising system. The FTC said that while there were some obvious instances of bias in Google’s results during the investigation, there wasn’t enough evidence to take legal action.
Google anti-competitive case in Brazil
Another country where Google has seen a significant win on anti-competitive charges in Brazil. The case against Google in Brazil had similar arguments as seen in EU and US with complainants arguing that the search giant was manipulating its search service to allow Google Shopping to display images.
The complainants which included Brazilian shopping comparison site Buscape, BondFaro and E-Bit , also accused Google of usurping database of reviews and “artificially including Google Shopping in the first ranks of the search results,” reports Search engine land.
The courts, however, rejected all of the arguments by the complainants saying that Google was not a monopoly and that users don’t have to rely on Google Search to go to a particular shopping site.
With agency inputs