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Google rejects EU competition allegations
2015-08-28 08:56:00| Telecompaper Headlines
(Telecompaper) Google has rejected the European Commission's allegations of violations of competition law by the search engine in the comparison shopping market. Google had until 31 August to reply to the EC's statement of objections submitted in April. Google's general counsel Kent Walker provided a summary of the company's position in a blog post, saying the EC's "preliminary conclusions are wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics". Google disputes the EC claim that it diverts traffic away from other shopping services, saying the EC does not take into account the wider competition in the market from big players like Amazon and eBay, nor the many smaller comparison sites that have sprung up in many EU countries. Furthermore, Google sends an increasing amount of traffic to these new sites, noting it delivered more than 20 billion free clicks to aggregators over the past decade in the region. It also defended its record on providing "quality" search results to end-users, and the incorporation of data from other sites in the Google Shopping service. "Users on desktop and mobile devices often want to go straight to trusted merchants who have established an online presence," Walker said, noting that advertisers and users "like these formats". Finally., Google objected to an EC suggestion that a possible remedy may be requiring that Google show ads sourced and ranked by other companies within its advertising space. The company cited the former president of the EU's General Court, Bo Vesterdorf as saying that such an obligation could be legally justified only where a company has a duty to supply its own rivals as where it controls an input that is both essential and not available anywhere else (like gas or electricity). Google said there was not support for this standard to apply, given the many ways to reach consumers on the internet.
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Category:Telecommunications