Home
Internet
Internet News
Google Reveals How It Plans to Comply With EU Antitrust Order

Google Reveals How It Plans to Comply With EU Antitrust Order

By Reuters | Updated: 30 August 2017 10:14 IST

Highlights

Google will meet the EU antitrust order deadline
Google was hit with a record EUR 2.4 billion fine from the EU in June
It was accused of abusing its market dominance in search results

Google has submitted details of how it plans to stop favouring its shopping service to comply with a European Union antitrust order, EU regulators said on Tuesday.

The world's most popular Internet search engine, a unit of Alphabet Inc, had earlier on Tuesday said it would meet the EU deadline to do so.

Google was hit with a record EUR 2.4 billion ($2.9 billion) fine from the EU over the practice in June and had until midnight on Tuesday to come up with proposals to end the anti-competitive behaviour.

The European Commission said on June 27 that Google had abused its dominance in Europe to give prominent placements in searches to its own comparison shopping service, demoting those of rivals.

As well as ordering Google to come up with a solution, the Commission said the US company must stop the practice by September 28.

Failure to do so could expose the company to penalty payments of as much as 5 percent of Alphabet's average daily worldwide turnover - or around $12 million a day, based on the parent company's 2016 turnover of $90.3 billion.

"Google will continue to be under an obligation to keep the Commission informed of its actions by submitting periodic reports," a spokesman for the EU executive said after saying the proposal had been received.

Lobbying group ICOMP, whose members include Google rivals online mapping services Hot Map and Streetmap, as well as CEPIC (Centre of the Picture Industry) and TradeComet which owns a rival search engine, said regulators should publicise Google's proposal.

"These affect everyone in the online and mobile worlds, so they must be made public for evaluation," ICOMP head Michael Weber said.

Google is also under fire from the EU over practices related to its smartphone mobile operating system Android, where it may face a landmark fine by the end of the year, and regarding online search advertising.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.