Back in June Google was hit with two and a half billion fine for antitrust issues by the European Commission. The internet search giant, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., was accused of prioritizing its own store over other competing stores within its search engine. If they did not comply and propose a solution within 60 days and implement them by 90 days, September 28th 2017, then they would be fined 5% of daily revenue for each day they do not comply. They have been under investigation since then over its other products, such as Android and its advertising business. Google denied any wrongdoing when it first was accused. Kent Walker, senior vice president of the company, said this on the matter.
“There is simply no meaningful correlation between the evolution of our search services and the performance of price comparison sites. Meanwhile, over those same ten years, a rapidly increasing amount of traffic flowed from our search pages to popular sites like Amazon and eBay as they expanded in Europe, hardly a sign of our ‘favouring’ our own ads.”
He then went further, citing two studies to show that Google’s influence on where consumers shop has been minimal. One study is American, the other German.
Now things have changed according to a report from Bloomberg.
Google Give In
Google had until the 29th of August to tell the European Commission how they planned to fix the issue. A spokeswoman for Google stated that they are sharing their plans with regulators, but did not make the plans public. Google’s reluctance to fight the case is interesting, as Intel fought their 1.2 billion euro fine in 2009, with the final ruling to be laid out next year. The case has been delayed 8 years, so the fact Google isn’t opting to take the long fight raises questions if they believe the Commission’s ruling is just. We’ll wait and see what happens, but for now it seems they have accepted defeat and take full responsibility for their search manipulation. That, or it’s just not worth fighting it.
Source: Bloomberg
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