Google has been battling with the European Union for about three years now over antitrust issues related to their search services. Recently, the EU moved a little closer to settling this lengthy legal case. They are taking a settlement proposal to a group of people for approval. What may sound odd to many is which individuals and organizations the settlement is being presented to for approval.
The EU is asking Google’s competitors as well as other third party organizations to review the settlement to ensure it is acceptable to them. According to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, 125 companies have been asked to review and comment on the latest proposal. While the EU’s ‘Competition Agency’ has not officially confirmed this yet, it is in line with what they said was going to be the next step in the case last month.
The latest settlement proposal has Google displaying three sets of results from rival search engines. They place these results under the “specialized” search results. The rival search engines will have to bid against each other for their placement. The latest change to the proposal lowers the minimum bid price from 10 EU cents to 3 EU cents. It also allows rivals to opt out of services as they desire. So, if one rival search engine doesn’t want to bid on ad placements in image results, they don’t have to, but will still reserve the right to bid on search results in the normal search page.
If accepted, Google will be forced to accept ad placements from rival search engines, even at artificially low prices (depending on what the rivals bid). Google was facing a similar lawsuit in the US, which was already settled. The FTC in the US did not give Google’s competitors any say in the results of that case, saying that the goal of the FTC was to protect competition, not promote competitors.
One thing many are taking notice of in the EU legal case is that the competition agency is taking input from Google’s competitors, but they are not allowing any insight from the general public. They are not invited to comment or make recommendations on the settlement, which is giving the appearance that the EU is more concerned with helping Google’s competitors than they are helping the actual people doing the searches.
You can gather more information about this case in the following areas:
Story from the Wall Street Journal about this latest proposal is HERE. A story from The Register about the EU’s decision to seek feedback from rivals is HERE. A story about the FTC’s handling of the US version of this case is HERE.
