“Google willing to make further concessions to Europe”

Google is willing to make further concessions to avoid a lengthy investigation into its competition practices, Reuters news agency reported. Google’s previous settlement proposals for changes to its search engine were rejected.

The two anonymous sources that Reuters refers to do not say exactly what proposals Google has made, but the European Commission is said to be pleased with the settlement proposals. Among other things, Google would like to make certain changes in the way it displays content from competitors.

The European Commission has accused Google, which is the market leader in Europe by a considerable margin, of favoring its own services in its search results. Google and the EU have been negotiating a settlement for some time to avoid a lengthy competition procedure like Microsoft’s at the beginning of this century. Previous proposals from Google, for example, where the search giant proposed to clearly label links to its own services and oblige itself to provide links to competitors, were shot down by the Commission.