BRUSSELS \u2014 After a seven-year legal battle, European authorities came down hard on Google on Tuesday for taking advantage of its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own businesses, fining the tech giant a record $2.72 billion and raising the prospect of…<\/b>
\nBRUSSELS \u2014 After a seven-year legal battle, European authorities came down hard on Google on Tuesday for taking advantage of its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own businesses, fining the tech giant a record $2.72 billion and raising the prospect of more.
A years-long analysis of Google\u2019s online search results showed that the company lists links to its own online shopping services above those of rivals, European regulators said. On average, Google lists search results to its biggest rivals in online shopping only on the fourth page of results \u2014 and smaller rivals even lower. That\u2019s a huge advantage for Google when 90 percent of use-clicks are on the main page.
The ruling that Google is taking advantage of its market dominance in online searches paves the way for a broader crackdown by the EU, which is investigating several other Google businesses, like its online images and travel businesses.
\u201cWhat Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation, \u201d EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.
To avoid more pain in Europe, Google will have to change the way it does business in the region. It has 90 days to stop favoring its own links to online shopping or face more fines of up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide revenue of parent company Alphabet.
Google says it is considering an appeal and maintains it\u2019s just trying to package its search results in a way that makes it easier for consumers to find what they want.
\u201cWe will review the Commission\u2019s decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case, \u201d Kent Walker, senior vice president at Google, said in a statement.
When it comes to online shopping, a big problem is that consumers don\u2019 t spend enough time doing different searches and instead focus on Google searches to find the best price, experts say. And there are plenty of search tools \u2014 from Camelcamelcamel, which tracks Amazon prices over time, to eBates, a shopping portal that offers coupons and cash back from 2,000 online retailers.
Internet consultant Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodal urges shoppers to go directly to retailers\u2019 sites to find the best deals. In Europe, she cites the online sites of Tesco and Walmart \u2019s Asda, for example.
\u201cGoogle has become a shortcut to buying, not a shortcut to saving money, \u201d said Benjamin Glaser, features editor of DealNews, a comparison shopping site. He also says that Google searches only look for the lowest prices for that moment and also doesn\u2019 t incorporate shipping discounts and coupons as other deal sites like DealNews and eBates do.
The fine on Google is the highest ever imposed in Europe for anticompetitive behavior, exceeding a penalty on Silicon Valley chipmaker Intel in 2009, about $1.4 billion at the time.
The penalty itself is unlikely to leave a dent in Google\u2019s finances. Alphabet has more than $92 billion in cash, including almost $56 billion in accounts outside of Europe.
But it could affect Google\u2019s way of doing business in the longer-term. U. S. interest groups were quick to latch onto the European ruling to argue that a similar approach be taken in the United States.
\u201cSome may object to the EU moving so aggressively against U. S.-based companies, but these authorities are at least trying to deal with some of the new competitive challenges facing our economy, \u201d said the News Media Alliance . \u201cU. S. lawmakers and regulatory authorities, by contrast, have been \u2018asleep at the switch\u2019 for far too long.\u201d
\u201cWe will monitor Google\u2019s compliance closely, \u201d Vestager said.
She noted that any company or person who has suffered damages due to the company\u2019s practices can make claims to national courts.
More broadly, Vestager said, the probe has established that Google is dominant in general Internet search in all 31 countries of the European economic area. This will affect other cases the European Commission might build against the Internet giant\u2019s various businesses, like Google Images.
She also noted that regulators are making \u201cgood progress\u201d in its other Google probes into Android and search advertising, and that the \u201cpreliminary conclusion\u201d is that they breach EU anti-trust rules.
The commission has come under fire in the United States for a perceived bias against U. S. companies.
Vestager said she has examined statistics concerning anti-trust, merger control and state aid decisions and that \u201cI can find no facts to support any kind of bias.\u201d<\/p>\n

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