Google and EU anti-trust rules

For those of you following news in Europe regarding the search engine giant, Google, you will know they place the interest of the people before anything else. Last week, we have heard of the news of the European Union fining Google billions for breaching antitrust rules.

This is to do with Google’s online shopping service. Regulators in Europe have said that “Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.”

Regulators have given the company 90 days to stop or risk facing fines of up to five percent of the average daily worldwide turnover of the parent company Alphabet. The reason for the fine is due to the fact that Google is not really providing the best deals on their shopping service.

The ones that did get chosen for the best deals ended up being the their own placement. They demoted rival services even though they did offer the better deals some of the time.

These actions are illegal under EU antitrust rules. The idea is that it did not allow other companies to be able to compete on the merits and to innovate. The most important point is that they lead European consumers to believe those were their genuine choices of services between the best deals.

Google has responded back that they were simply trying to package its search results to give customers an easier time to find what they want. They said they want consumers to have an easier time to shop online. At the same time advertisers want to promote these same products. That is the reason Google shows shopping ads to be able to connect users to the advertisers in ways that are useful to both.

The next step for Google is to appeal the decision and look forward to continue to make their case. The fine of 2.62 billion euros is the highest ever imposed in Europe for anti-competitive behavior.

If you look at Google’s finances, you would figure that fine is just a small percentage of their cash. This ordeal hurts their reputation more than anything else. The EU Competition Commissioner said the probe started in 2008 and looked at nearly 1.7 billion queries. Investigators found that the most highly ranked rivals only appeared on page 4 of Google search results.

We all know just how unlikely it is for someone to go all the way to page four in search queries.