The European Commission’s decision can come back once a seven-year investigation into the world’s hottest internet search engine was triggered by lots of complaints from each US and European rivals.
The EU competition authority defendant Google in April 2015 of distorting web search results to favor its shopping service, harming its rivals and customers.
The Commission and Google declined to comment made by the Rivals and Consumers. The US company has in the past rejected the charges made by the Commission, saying that regulators ignored competition from online retailers Amazon and eBay.
Fines for companies found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules can reach 10 percent of their global turnover in a year, which in Google’s case could be about $9 Billion Dollars of its 2016 turnover.
Apart from these fines, the Commission will tell Google to stop its alleged anti-competitive practice in the business but it is not clear what measures taken it will order the company to adopt to ensure that rivals get equal treatment in internet shopping results.
“The regulators could set out general principles or specific instructions for Google to follow,” said an observer.
The Commission’s tough decision and it is already in it’s a sharp contrast with the US Federal Trade Commission which settled its own web search case with the company in 2013 by requiring Google to stop “scraping” review data and other data from rival websites for its own products.
Google made three unsuccessful attempts to settle the case once in for all but with the previous European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia in a bid to stave off possible fines and a finding of wrongdoing.
Mr. Almunia’s successor Margrethe Vestager, however, has shown no willingness to settle with Google Inc.
The platform allows Google to act as an intermediary for their websites such as online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers. The Commission has warned of massive fine in both the cases.
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