The European Union spent nearly a decade prosecuting Google over antitrust charges, and eventually fined it about $ 10 billion for using illegal tactics to maintain its dominance in the market.
Two years after the decision was issued, weak competition for Google emerged, in part because the European Union left it largely to the American company to deal with the problem, according to what was reported by the Washington Post.
Google imposed fees on competing search engines that wanted to appear in the lists of its Android operating system, a move that competitors rejected and said it did not enhance competitiveness.
With the US Department of Justice filing the antitrust lawsuit against Google last month, US government attorneys reviewed European investigations, and data showed that Google continues to dominate more than 90% of the search engine market in Europe.
This percentage is the same before the European Union launched investigations in 2010, and competitors still complain about the monopoly, especially in the field of online shopping.
Experts believe that the European Union is finding it difficult to return competition to the market, because it is already under the control of Google, and they say that the Union may not have sufficient political power to impose tougher measures on an American company.
"Politically speaking, the European Union will not fight an American company," said Thomas Fengi, an antitrust attorney at Clifford Chance. He is a lawyer who advises companies that have complained about Google, such as Oracle and Trip Advice.
The lawsuit filed by the Ministry of Justice and won by the government showed that there are more stringent measures against Google, including the restructuring that may include selling the company part of its business.
After the United States filed a lawsuit against the tech giant, Kent Walker, Google's vice president for global affairs, said that users choose Google when they are not forced to and can find alternatives, describing the lawsuit as deeply flawed and not serving users.
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda opposed the idea that the European Commission investigations had not changed anything, and said that the investigations had prompted Google to make changes, including intensive monitoring and the provision of more than 600 shopping services.
Among the most prominent search engines competing for Google in Europe are Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo, and they are among those who filed antitrust lawsuits against Google.
The 60-page US lawsuit data showed that Google used illegal methods to ensure the search engine and its applications were widely approved by phone manufacturers and mobile network operators.
The commission's investigation that ended in 2018 found that Google asked Android phone manufacturers to preinstall Google's search engine and Chrome browser apps as a condition for licensing the Google Play app store, and it paid some phone manufacturers and mobile network operators for that.
These practices deprived competitors of the opportunity to innovate and compete on the basis of advantages, but Google offered them bids for a place on the search engine selection list for new Android phones, according to the newspaper.
0 Comments