European Regulators At It Again
The NY Times reports that regulators are looking at whether Google is stifling search competition in Europe. The case involves 3 search competitors: UK price-comparison site, Foundem; French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Ciao! from Bing. They are claiming that Google doesn’t give them the search rankings they deserve.
I’ve noted before how the EU seems to regard U.S. tech companies as ATM machines. Google, however, is pointing the finger at Microsoft:
“Given that these complaints will generate interest in the media, we wanted to provide some background to them. First, search. Foundem – a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft – argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr’s complaint seems to echo these concerns … Regarding Ciao!, they were a long-time AdSense partner of Google’s, with whom we always had a good relationship. However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao! in 2008 (renaming it Ciao! from Bing) we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions.”
