Google acts to comply with EU antitrust order

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

As one of the most popular Internet search engines, Google said it would meet the EU deadline to do so earlier on Tuesday.

Google was hit with a record fine of 2.9 billion US dollars from the EU over the practice in June and had until midnight on Tuesday to come up with proposals to end the anticompetitive behavior.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager holds a news conference at the EU Commission's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. /Reuters Photo

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 Sept. 28.

Failure to do so could expose the company to penalty payments of as much as five percent of Alphabet’s average daily worldwide turnover – or around 12 million US dollars a day, based on the parent company’s 2016 turnover of 90.3 billion US dollars.

“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 once the proposal had been received.

Google's Logo /Reuters Photo

Lobbying group ICOMP, whose members include Google rivals online mapping services Hot Map and Streetmap, as well as CEPIC (Center of the Picture Industry) and TradeComet which owns a rival search engine, said regulators should publicize 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 online search advertising and its smartphone mobile operating system Android, for which it may face a landmark fine by the end of the year.

Source(s): Reuters