Europe : EU antitrust regulators charge Google for third time
BRUSSELS : EU antitrust regulators accused Alphabet Inc’s Google on Thursday of preventing rivals from competing with the company in the lucrative online search advertising market, bringing their third charge against the company.
The European Commission also reinforced its existing charge against the world’s most popular Internet search engine that its search results favour Google’s own shopping service over that of rivals.
The Commission said in a statement that it had sent two “statements of objections” to Google.
The new charge sheet accuses Google of having abused its dominant position by artificially preventing third party websites from displaying search advertisements from its competitors.
This relates to Google’s “AdSense for Search” platform, in which Google acts as an intermediary for websites such as those of online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers, with searches producing results that include search ads.
It also said it had reinforced its preliminary conclusion that Google had abused its dominant position by systematically favouring its comparison shopping service in its search result pages.
