Google Says "No" to EU's Antitrust Complaints

The giant company has sent a massive reply to the EU that accused Google of abusing its search dominance in the comparison-shopping market.

This year, in April Margrethe Vestager, who is EU Competition Commissioner, composed a statement of objections to Google, threatening fines and other regulatory actions. Response of Google took about 100 pages, where the company rejected Vesteger’s claims, telling that their services have already helped rivals and increased choice for consumers from Europe.

The statement of objections says that when Google displays paid ads from merchants (earlier these were specialized groups of organic search results) moved the traffic away from the shopping services.

In its turn, Kent Walker, who is Google’s lawyer shared in his blog post the summary of company’s reply. He wrote that SO doesn’t take into account the evident benefits to both advertisers and consumers, doesn’t back up the claim and doesn’t actually provide a clear legal theory to adjust the claims with the proposed remedy.

Walker also said that in their response Google provides complete evidence including economic data, traffic analysis and plenty of statements and documents, which show that EU’s concerns came without merit. Besides that, Kent Walker told that the European Union completely ignored the fact that Google helped to drive traffic of such shopping services like eBay and Amazon.

Better selection for consumers

“The niche of shopping services has been essentially improved by the increased traffic provided by Google. There have appeared new investments, new players and a larger consumer choice. Google benefited into more than twenty billion of free clicks to aggregators over the last 10 years. These results along with the free traffic, increased by 228% (and if speaking about the total traffic, the number was even more) were achieved in all countries covered by the statement of objections.

“The new ad format of Google’s shopping unit is absolutely no anticompetitive”, say company’s representatives. Otherwise, it benefits to the ad’s quality and makes it easier for customers to get the right product.

“The ad groups are showed in their regular place – at the top and to the right of organic Google results. There are also used specific algorithms to increase the results’ relevance for users. Data received from advertisers and users confirm that people like this type of format. That’s not a favor, that’s just provides our consumers and customers with what they find useful for them.” –tells Walker.

Taking into account his words, the SO searches for a specific and troublesome remedy from Google, asking them to show ads selected and ranked by other companies within its advertising space. This will negatively affect the relevance and quality of search results.

Google also said that they believe that the preliminary conclusions made by SO are completely wrong as a matter of fact, economics and low. As a conclusion, he said that they’d like to discuss their response and evident facts with the commission, having as the main interest open competition and promotion of user’s choice.

About the Author: Ann Johnson is a freelancer for educational sites like www.bestessaypro.com. She finished Columbia University and now helps students to succeed in academic writing and study.