Google accused of rigging its search results
The competition commission of India began investigating Google in 2012, especially their usage of AdWords, its online advertisement service, accuses Google of abusing search dominance in India.
Google is also preparing for protracted legal dispute with the European Commission which this year accused the multi-national group of unfairly promoting its shopping services in search results. It follows global antitrust investigations including a 2013 ruling in the US that cleared the company of giving unfair search prominence to its own products.
Indian government is acting on four complaints against Google, one filed by an Indian online matrimonial site Bharat Matrimony , Consumer Unity & Trust Society, a consumer protection group. Flipkart, Facebook, Nokia’s maps division, MakeMy-Trip have all corroborated complaints that the US internet giant Google and market leader abused its dominant position, in response to CCI’s queries.
The CCI’s 714-page report concluded that Google’s search engine steers user to its own services and products. It accused Google search Engine of not giving the users the most relevant results. This affects e-commerce, social networking, travel and maps and search advertising.
The report criticises Google’s AdWord’s system, giving special preferences to Google’s in-house adverts and unfairly allows users to buy online ads based on trademarked terms, such as company names.
Google’s proprietary content supersedes relevance of search by an individual.
The sponsored links thrown up after a search are totally dependent on the amount of advertising paid to Google and sometimes even supersedes the link of the actual trademarks being searched. Google search results have a direct correlation with the amount of money the ecommerce portal spends on Google advertising.
Google said it was reviewing the report but disputed many of its findings, citing that it complied fully with Indian competition laws.
Google spokesperson states “ Regulators and courts around the world, including Germany, US, Taiwan, Egypt and Brazil have already looked into and found no concerns in many of the issues raise in this report.”
Google is preparing a response to the report, which must be submitted next week.
The CCI’s chairman Dhanendra Kumar warned the investigation at this early stages have only till now only revealed an initial draft investigative report and did not reflect the full commissions findings. “ These preliminary reports are fact finding exercises and the commission will take its own independent views.”
The CCI will hold a hearing with those involved in two weeks time and if found guilty, the CCI can levy a fine of up to 10 per cent of average global revenues over the past three years, implying a maximum penalty could be as high as £3.64bn $5.6bn