EC Google Search Decision Could Set Major Precedent for Further EU Search Antitrust Rulings
The European Commission's expected fine against Google Search likely will be the headline, but banning Google's "immensely harmful manipulation practices will be far more important," U.K. vertical search company Foundem said in a statement Monday. Foundem, the lead complainant in the EU Google Search case, predicted any final order likely will extend beyond comparison shopping and won't be limited to desktop searches. A spokesman for the Competition Directorate said "the investigation is ongoing." Google didn't comment.
From Foundem's perspective, the Google Search case isn't about Google's comparison shopping service, but about its core search results and the "illegal practices Google uses to manipulate them," CEO Shivaun Raff emailed. For now, the EC limited formal charges to Google's application of these practices to divert traffic and revenue to its own comparison shopping market and away from rivals' services, she said. The EC in 2015 concluded the search company favors its own services via Universal Search, which artificially promotes Google's own specialized services, and through anti-competitive penalties that demote or exclude competing specialized services. That decision was reinforced in a 2016 supplementary statement of objections, Raff said.
"The final remedy is likely to extend beyond comparison shopping to include travel search, local search, and other existing and future specialised services," Raff said. If the EC adopts a prohibition decision, it will cover all of the search engine's search results, regardless of device, she wrote. EC Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said she will continue to look into other vertical services such as mapping, hotel and flight search markets (see 1504150002). In proposals made to the EC in the comparison search case, Google showed sample screen designs of searches on mobile devices as well as PCs.
Foundem and other challengers want even-handed nondiscrimination in comparison searches, Raff wrote. That would require Google to hold all services, including its own, to the same standards with regard to crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms, she said. The company has two categories of implementation options available, she said. Google could either retain Universal Search and find a way to incorporate rival services alongside its own, or give up on Universal Search and entrust the selection and ranking of appropriate specialized services to Google's core crawling and ranking algorithms, minus the anti-competitive penalties, Raff said.
The EC is highly likely to do what it did with Microsoft, said Thomas Vinje, counsel to FairSearch, whose members include Foundem and TripAdvisor. The EC will decide Google's comparison shopping service infringes EU antitrust law, order the search engine to end it, and give Google some time to propose solutions, he said in an interview. The EC is likely to require the company to provide equal treatment to competitors in its comparison shopping service and in any criteria used to demote certain shopping sites in searches, he said. This will force Google to change how it runs its general search service when it produces results related to queries for comparison shopping sites, he said.
The comparison shopping decision will be important, but it's more significant what impact it will have more broadly for Google, Vinje said. It could have precedential value for the search engine's conduct on all verticals under investigation by the EC, he said. Even more far-reaching will be what the EC decides about whether the company is imposing anti-competitive restrictions on Android device makers and mobile network operators, Vinje said. "Mobile is where it's at" and Google's control over huge quantities of data due to its domination of licensing in the mobile apps market means there's more money at stake and more to play for with regard to competition, he said.