EU Antitrust Watchdog Wants More Out Of Google

The European Union Competition Commissioner is ramping up the rhetoric against Google. The latest threat? Comply with our requests or face billions in fines.

If the U.S. tech giant fails to present better proposals to reach a settlement, the EU will start the traditional antitrust procedure, the EU's competition watchdog chief Joaquin Almunia said Wednesday. That more confrontational route could take years, but also result in fines worth billions of dollars.

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Since they were successful in extorting billions from Microsoft they are moving on to other targets with deep pockets.

EU must be in need of more money....they seem to do this when the coffer's run low.

I suspect the response will be something along the lines of "Requests are irrelevant. You will be assimilated."

Use another search engine?

In its second round of proposals in October, Google's main concession was to offer competitors the chance to advertise their own services and brand in the second row of search results, below the Google-branded result.

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I totally get that, however that would only confirm officially that Google Search is NOT a search engine, but simply a brochure. Which it clearly is. Care to re-brand your product, dear Google?

My favourite response by Google was that since it's an american company, it's only bound to their laws haha lol. EC should've slapped them with a few billion for that statement alone.

They don't even pay taxes in the USA. They have one of those tax shelters in another country. Didn't at least one of the founders switch citizenship to save on taxes? Can't ever mistakenly call them "American". Fine da hellz out of them!

While the EU has the right to regulate their markets, they have used some pretty lame reasoning to justify huge fines in the past, and it is pretty clear that any market leader with deep pockets is going to face huge fines unless they have the appropriate political ties (such as Apple).

I doubt that Google has any hope of pleasing the regulators unless they are willing to give their competitors advantages worth far more than the fines. The competition commission generates a lot of revenue for the EU. I see little reason why they will settle with Google when not settling gains them billions of dollars.

the EU will be out of biz long before Google