‘EC wants to decide within a few months whether Google abused its dominant position’

The European Union plans to finalize its investigations into Google soon, EU official Tommasso Valletti told a conference attended by Reuters news agency. It is not known whether there is a fine involved.

The news agency writes that the Commission wants to make a decision “in the next few months” on whether Google has abused its dominant market position in several markets. It would involve decisions in all cases that the Commission has against Google, of which the Android case, according to Valletti, is “the most interesting” for him. A fine can amount to a maximum of ten percent of the annual turnover. Parent company Alphabet achieved a turnover of 90 billion dollars in 2016, Reuters reports.

There are a total of three Commission investigations into Google’s practices. The European Commission filed a complaint against Google in the Android case a year ago. The complaint stated that the internet company was abusing its market position by requiring smartphone and tablet makers to pre-install Google apps, such as Search and the Chrome browser, on their Android devices. According to Google, the delivery of apps is necessary to continue investing in its operating system.

The second case concerns Google’s position in the search engine market. The company allegedly uses the popularity of the search engine to give its other services such as price comparison sites an unfair advantage by placing them prominently in search results. The last case has to do with Google’s AdSense. The core of this case is that, according to the Commission, Google has infringed competition rules through its AdSense platform over the past ten years by imposing certain conditions in agreements with a limited number of large third parties. This specifically concerns search ads that are displayed after users have searched for something on websites that use a custom search engine from Google.