Google Inc. (GOOG) offered concessions to European Union regulators in an effort to end an antitrust investigation into allegations that the operator of the world’s largest search engine discriminates against rivals.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt sent EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia a letter responding to the probe, the EU said in a statement. The settlement offer addresses the “four areas the European Commission described” as potential concerns, Google spokesman Al Verney said in a separate e-mail. Details of the proposals weren’t disclosed.
This is just the beginning and relatively simple. The lobbying for containment of Google is going to extend to many areas as more businesses feel threatened. The difficulty has always been the quality of building cases on more complex issues involving the organic search algoritmn and what it promotes and prioritises.
If you cut the. Google bull dust and spins, relevance and quality can be highly subjective and prejudice unfairly one result over another, or indeed ruining otherwise sound businesses. But bringing a clear case on a regulatory level beats me to define.
jecasc
4:24 pm on Jul 4, 2012 (gmt 0)
On a related note: Google is no longer "supporting" Opera on some of its services like blogger, recommending the use of Chrome instead.
