Google lost its biggest regulatory battle yet after being handed a record 2.4 billion euro (US$2.7 billion) fine by the EU, which said the search-engine giant skewed results in its favor to thwart smaller shopping search services.
Alphabet Inc’s Google has 90 days to “stop its illegal conduct” and give equal treatment to rival price-comparison services, a binding order from the European Commission said yesterday.
It is up to Google to choose how it does this and it must tell the EU within 60 days of its plans. Failure to comply brings a risk of fines of up to 5 percent of its daily revenue.
Photo: AFP
“Google’s strategy for its comparison-shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals,” EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said. “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.”
Shares of California-based Google fell 1.5 percent in pre-market trading in New York. They have risen 23 percent so far this year.
Vestager’s decision marked the end of a lengthy seven-year probe fueled by complaints from small shopping Web sites, as well as bigger names, such as News Corp, Axel Springer SE and Microsoft Corp.
European politicians have called on the EU to sanction Google or even break it up, while US critics claim regulators are targeting the nation’s successful firms.
“I expect the commission now to swiftly conclude the other two ongoing investigations against Google,” German European Parliament lawmaker Markus Ferber said.
“Unfortunately, the Google case also illustrates that competition cases tend to drag on for far too long before they are eventually resolved,” he said. “In a fast-moving digital economy this means often enough that market abuse actually pays off and the abuser succeeds in eliminating the competition.”
Google has been pushing its own comparison shopping service since 2008, systematically giving it prominent placement when people search for an item, the EU said.
Rival comparison sites usually only appear on page four of search results, effectively denying them a massive audience, as the first page attracts 95 percent of all clicks.
“As a result of Google’s illegal practices, traffic to Google’s comparison-shopping service increased significantly, whilst rivals have suffered very substantial losses of traffic on a lasting basis,” the EU said, citing a 45 percent increase in traffic for Google’s service.
Yesterday’s fine could be just the first in a series of EU antitrust penalties for Google, which is fighting on at least two other fronts, including its Android mobile-phone software and the AdSense online advertising service.
The decision follows Russia’s US$7.8 million antitrust fine and penalties from Italian, German and French privacy authorities.
Europe has proved a tough jurisdiction for Google, which fell foul of the region’s top court, losing a high-profile right-to-be-forgotten case three years ago.
“Vestager is proving she means business,” said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer who represents FairSearch, a group of companies that complained to the EU. “This decision will mean that consumers receive comparison-shopping results that offer genuinely the best purchasing options.”
Regulators also called on Google to change the way it handles online shopping searches, one of its biggest sources of sales growth and one of its strongest weapons against rivals Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained