Google CEO Sundar Pichai is to meet with EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager in Brussels this week, a source familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
European competition officials have been investigating the US tech giant for years over alleged monopolistic practices involving its search engines, but any resolution has been elusive. Three successive proposals by Google for an amicable settlement have been rejected.
Vestager last year sent a “statement of objections,” which said Google had diverted traffic from rival price-comparison services like Kelkoo, which operates in several European countries, to favor its own comparison shopping service.
Google responded in August last year that Brussels’s findings were wrong and based on a flawed evaluation of the market.
If no agreement is reached and the group is found to have broken the EU’s antitrust rules, it could face fines amounting to billions of US dollars.
In addition to the initial inquiry into Google’s search engines, which began in November 2010, the European competition service opened a second one in April last year to examine the group’s Android mobile operating system. This software, used by a wide range of brands, is installed in more than 80 percent of the world’s smartphones.
Vestager might also scrutinize Google’s back-tax deal with British tax authorities following a complaint from the Scottish National Party. Google last month agreed to pay £130 million (US$187.3 million) to settle tax claims covering a 10-year period, but opposition parties have called the amount derisory.
Pichai became Google’s CEO during a restructuring last year that installed a new holding company, Alphabet Inc, as Google’s parent.
Google now focuses on its core businesses — online activity, Android, YouTube — while its peripheral interests, such as driverless cars, are overseen directly by Alphabet.
The sources described Pichai’s visit as an introductory meeting. He is scheduled to be in Brussels on Thursday, where he is to meet with Vestager, as well as EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Gunther Oettinger and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Topics to be discussed include the digital single market, as well as digital skills and jobs.
European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso declined to comment.
Pichai is to be in Barcelona, Spain, today and tomorrow for the Mobile World Congress and in Paris on Wednesday to meet with publishers.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt met Vestager in March last year, but failed to appease her.
Additional reporting by Reuters
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts