For years, Google has been involved in an antitrust battle with the European Union with the latter being unhappy with the search giant's attempted concessions. In the latest development of the struggle, the European Parliament is seeking to create a split within Google's own framework which would place a division between its search business and its commercial ventures.
While the parliament in itself has no power to split up Google, the move will add political pressure on the European Union to heighten its antitrust investigation that it has started conducting in 2010. During that time, there were allegations that Google was secretly burying its smaller search competitors in the search results. The interesting part is that Google's search side in Europe makes up 90 percent of the region's search market compared to the 70 percent share in the U.S.
"I think it'd be very difficult for Google to disaggregate all its own assets and interests from Google Search just in Europe," said Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa and one of the leading American experts on European antitrust law. "I'm not saying it couldn't do it, but it would be costly. You'd get a lot of squawking from European consumers because it would deteriorate the quality of Google search quite a bit."
Joaquin Almunia, former VP of the European Commission has outlined at least four main areas of concern in the antitrust investigation. First among them is that Google provides links to its own 'vertical search services' such as news, restaurant or YouTube preference over links from the competition. The second states that Google takes and uses content from rival companies. One example is Yelp's restaurant reviews. The third states that Google blocks entry of search advertising competitors on those sites where it places search advertisements. Lastly, it is believed that Google makes it difficult for advertisers to separate their advertising away from its very own AdWords system.
In February, Google has attempted to appease the European antitrust case with the promise of giving its rivals more prominence in specialized search results and allowing Yelp and other competitors to stop Google from using their site's content. So far, Google was not made to pay any fines. The Commission also learned that the search giant's business is not conducted illegally.
Former Google CEO and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt defended Google by saying that it only wants to provide users with the most direct answers in their search. Google only wants to be as direct as possible and provide its users the fastest responses which eventually save them from clicking further around.
"Put simply, we created search for users, not websites," said Schmidt. "And that's the motivation behind all our improvements over the last decade."
