European Commissioner Pressurizes Google Prior To Meeting With CEO Sundar Pichai

Google faces excessive pressure from European Commissioner.

Alphabet is being sunk into an anti-competitive quagmire. European Commission might beef an antitrust complaint against Google, as per reports of Bloomberg on February 22, 2016. American authorities are investigating the company too.

Proving abuses will not be easy, but the growing scope indicates that the company will need to exert more power to pull out of the problem. From a long period, it has been dominating web searches; it has almost captured two-thirds of the United States market, and a larger percentage in the markets of Europe. Due to this, regulators have scrutinized it for long.

Proving that Google has abusively used its position has not been easy. It is easy to click on another search engine and difficult to prove that the technology giant is harming people by injecting extra information into results. In 2013, American authorities stopped probing against Google after it pledged to behave responsibly.

Previously this month, a British court found the search organization had not unjustly crashed a competitor by placing its maps amongst the topmost search results. In 2015, the European Commission’s charges that Google favored its own shopping service were treading on old ground. An investigation into Google’s behavior with Android, nevertheless, would be more dangerous.

There is little rivalry in mobile operating systems and a leading provider can act abusively by grouping services and applications together. The antitrust problems of Microsoft had similar roots.

European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is piling on pressure prior to the meeting scheduled later this week with CEO of Google Sundar Pichai.

Europeans are investigating whether the advertising competition is being restricted by other means – like paying Apple for keeping Google as its iPhone’s default search engine. A transaction worth $1 billion between the two tech giants in 2014 was brought into light by the recently disclosed United States court documents.

Margrethe also state she is open to investigate whether a taxation agreement between UK and Alphabet led to illegal state aid. She would stretch her authority by threatening the tax agreements of Google and her anger might not pan out in a legal manner. However, it will have effects. This might have persuaded US regulatory bodies to reinitiate their probes in 2015.

More significantly, the amount of effort and time spend by Google in the press and court battling these allegations are revamping forward. This can leave competitors, such as Facebook, hunting for advertisers and new technologies, such as virtual reality, comparatively unencumbered.