Google rejects preliminary European Commission conclusions on abuse of power

In a formal response, Google contradicts the European Commission’s conclusions that it has abused its dominant position by systematically favoring its own price comparison product on search results pages.

To this end, the company sent a response to the European Commission on Thursday, August 27, in which it contradicts the ‘statement of objections’ that Google received on April 15 of this year. Google’s lawyer believes that the accusation that Google would favor itself is not correct. On the contrary, the company would provide more choice for European consumers and also offers plenty of opportunities for companies of all sizes.

With the documents submitted on Thursday, Google wants to prove that the EC’s concerns are unfounded. To show that Google is not harming other online price comparison sites, the company provides traffic analyzes of its data with the EC. To this end, the company draws on more than ten years of economic data. In addition to its own data, Google states that the ‘statement of objections’ forgets to mention the major impact of companies like Amazon and eBay when it comes to online shopping, because these are the ‘biggest players’ in the shopping field.

Also, through its lawyer, Google finds that it forwards a huge amount of traffic to store-related services and to new players in the market. Google claims to have provided more than 20 billion free clicks to other price comparison sites over the past decade in the countries covered by the Statement of Objections.

Google itself believes that the main reason for making it easier to compare prices within its own environment is the eternal search for quality. “Search results must be relevant, just like the ads we show.” In order to stay ahead of the competition, Google changed the ad format in 2012 to a price comparator with pictures of the products.

The committee thinks that by requiring Google to show ads from the portfolio of other companies, the problems can be solved. The company does not agree with this because the search results would deteriorate.

Should the European Commission decide to impose a fine in the future, this could amount to ten percent of the annual turnover. In 2014, Google achieved a turnover of 66 billion dollars, which would mean a fine of approximately 6.2 billion euros.

There is also an investigation into possible abuse of power by Google with its Android operating system.