It’s all a conspiracy
Google has already replied to the complaints in a blog post from Julia Holtz - senior competition counsel - entitled ‘Committed to competing fairly'.
Of course, Holtz insists Google is confident it has done nothing wrong. She gives an indication of where Google thinks this complaint originates by pointing out that Foundem is a member of ICOMP - an organisation dedicated to ensuring competition online that is sponsored by Microsoft (and also includes the Premier League among its members).
While we'd be surprised if Microsoft wasn't the primary driver behind these complaints, the fact that it has a competitive vested interest in knocking Google down a peg or two in no way invalidates the basic premise of the complaint: that Google is using its dominance of the market to unfairly favour its own products over competitive offerings.
The precedents are clear. Microsoft was nearly forced to split itself up by the EC after it was found to have abused its dominance of the PC operating system market to coerce OEMs into preinstalling other Microsoft products, such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Intel was recently fined by the EC for allegedly illegally coercing OEMs into using its CPUs over AMD's.
Holtz goes on to apparently appeal for sympathy, saying: "We are also the first to admit that our search is not perfect, but it's a very hard computer science problem to crack. Imagine having to rank the 272 million possible results for a popular query like the iPod on a 14 by 12 screen computer screen in just a few milliseconds."
But Google is likely to receive no more benefit of the doubt from the EC than Microsoft and Intel did. When you're a company with a market cap of over $170 billion - most of it founded on search-related revenue - saying ‘we're trying our best' just isn't good enough. Microsoft, which must be enjoying the delicious irony of being an EC complainant, knows this better than most.
UPDATE - 10:50, 24 February 2010 - The EC has issued the following statement on this matter:
Statement on press reports on complaints against Google
The Commission can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining. The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being. As is usual when the Commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations. The Commission closely cooperates with the national competition authorities. No further information can be given at this stage.
Google has made a statement on the subject that can be found on its website.
