What do you know Google for? Search? Now, the European Union has slapped Mountain View with a fine for 2.4 billion euros, €2,424,495,000 to be exact (2.7 billion USD).
The reason given is that the company favored its own comparison shopping product over others when displaying suggestions in Google Search.
Google first launched their comparison shopping service called Froogle in the European market in the year 2004. The name of the service was later changed to Google Product Search in 2008 and Google Shopping in 2013.
Screenshot: Google Search
Using the service, customers can compare item prices various e-commerce sites like Amazon and Ebay. According to a press release, it was the year 2008 when Google became more serious about promoting their comparison shopping service in Europe.
The EU said the company broke EU’s antitrust rules and used their marker dominance to take an edge over the competitors. The press release details the findings after an investigation which lasted for years:
Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results
They’ve asked Google to stop the malpractice in the next 90 days or a further fine of 5% on the daily global turnover of their parent Alphabet will be charged as the punishment.
“Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals,” said Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy.
She said that Google abused its market dominance as a search engine. “It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation.”
On the other hand, Google has denied these accusations and said that they always intended that the search results are easier for the customer.
“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both,” Kent Walker, SVP, and General Counsel, told 9jabreezeland in a statement.
“We respectfully disagree with the conclusions announced today. We will review the Commission’s decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case.”
Read Walker’s blog post where he has elaborated Google’s part of the story.
Got something to add? Drop your thoughts and feedback.
Facebook is updating its Live guidelines to limit the reach of fake and low-quality content. It's explicitly disallowing publishers from posting prerecorded videos as if they're livestreams and it also won't allow for static/looping images or livestreamed polls.
After months of wait, Poco has officially launched Poco F2 Pro. The phone is a sequel to the Poco F1 which was a huge success for the company back in 2018. It is also the second Poco contender in 2020. In February, the Poco brand revealed a new phone lineup and launched Poco X2. The phone was priced at Rs 15,999 and featured similar specs of Redmi K30, a Xiaomi flagship that was launched back in 2018. The company has applied the same strategy for today’s launch. As we expected, Poco F2 Pro bundles all the specs of Redmi K30 Pro that Xiaomi launched last month. Poco F2 Pro Specifications, Availability and Price Unlike the Poco X2, the phone offers a circular camera at the back and a pop-up selfie camera at the front as opposed to the regular dual-hole punch cutout on the display of Poco X2. Poco F2 Pro comes with a 6.67-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with a 92.7% screen to body ratio. On top of that, the phone has an in-display fingerprint sensor to keep up with...
As we told you earlier, WSL on Windows 10 moved out of beta in August. It still carries the beta tag in Windows 10 Creators Update. Also, it won’t require people to enable developer
The accuracy of speech recognition increases through use, and the feature adapts itself to a user’s grammar, word usage, speech patterns, and vocabulary.
Comments
Post a Comment