New York: The European Union (EU) slapped Google with antitrust charges on Wednesday, saying it is abusing its dominance in Web search to promote its own products
Here are the major allegations:
- The EU says Google is unfairly favouring its own comparison-shopping service in general search results. A person searching for, say, a coffee mug would find Google Shopping results for mugs displayed at the top of the search page, even if a competing price-comparison site had more or better information.
- The EU says part of the reason for competing sites' low rankings is that Google applied different parameters to comparison-shopping services, which can lead to those services having a lower rank in general search pages.
- The EU pointed out that a previous Google shopping site called Froogle did not use a favorable system and performed poorly. The current Google Shopping product, which allegedly uses the favorable system, is experiencing higher growth.
- Also under investigation is Google's smartphone operating system, Android. The EU is looking in whether the company is giving smartphone makers unfair incentives for preinstalling Google's applications, such as the Chrome Web browser and YouTube.
- The EU is also continuing a formal investigation into concerns that Google copies rivals Web content and places undue restrictions on advertisers.
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