Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint

Re:Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint by magicalist on Thursday August 27, 2015 @02:18PM (#10131078)

> No, not at all.

> The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back

That's been somewhat the narrative around here, but that doesn't appear to be true at all:

> The Statement of Objections takes the preliminary view that in order to remedy the conduct, Google should treat its own comparison shopping service and those of rivals in the same way. This would not interfere with either the algorithms Google applies or how it designs its search results pages. It would, however, mean that when Google shows comparison shopping services in response to a user's query, the most relevant service or services would be selected to appear in Google's search results pages.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm

I didn't realize this. I thought it was more wide ranging.

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Re:Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint by germanier on Thursday August 27, 2015 @02:27PM (#10131129)

There is a separate formal investigation on Android currently: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...

Additionally, the EC currently looks into Google's "copying of rivals’ web content (known as 'scraping'), exclusivity in its agreements with advertising partners and undue restrictions of advertisers' ability to use competing advertising platforms" (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.ht...) but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet.

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Re:Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint by magicalist on Thursday August 27, 2015 @02:35PM (#10131182)

So the answer to my question is still "yes", the statement of objections was only about comparison shopping :)

> but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet

and it may never, considering the changes made for the FTC.

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Re:Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint by _rpd on Thursday August 27, 2015 @03:40PM (#10131576)

I tried to replicate the results of the BBC article to see what the fuss was about, but the search results did in fact list 'rival' price comparison shopping sites. It took me a while to realize that this was because I had adblock turned on.

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