Google in EU Antitrust Investigation

Contrary to tabloid legend, the European Union isn’t just there to make sure our bananas are straight and that goats are properly labelled. It is also our vanguard against such horrors as Microsoft bundling its browser with its OS and other unconscionable acts of evil. Thanks to them, you now have to sit through 14 option screens whenever you upgrade IE and might soon have to do the same when a website wants to drop a cookie.

Today, the European Commission  has written to Google to ask for an explanation into how its algorithm works (we didn’t we think of that? D’oh!) as part of preliminary investigation into whether Google’s size is distorting the market and effectively acting as a brake on competitors in the online sphere. We can’t help but think that this was always going to happen some day, given the EU’s instinctive distrust of large technology companies.

What prompted the move? Complaints from what you might think are some of the “usual suspects” – i.e., people who can’t rank in Google. Ciao, a German shopping comparison site (owned by Microsoft – the irony!) some French website concerning legal matters and… Foundem.

Ahem.

Foundem are a price comparison site who have been complaining  long and loud to anyone who will listen that their site is so good that Google should be ranking them by right. Their story has been covered in greater depth elsewhere, but really the site has no content of its own and many pages are literally nothing but links (check out the source of http://www.foundem.co.uk/search/books.jsp or http://www.foundem.co.uk/search/computing/L/Peripherals.jsp for example). If you’re an SEO, the subtext of this is “we don’t understand how to channel the equity we have” – which is madness when you have a solid PR5 domain that has had a lot of news media links on the back of its fight against Google.  There’s also an apparent reluctance to do the little things like invest in a little content. In fact, once you turn off Javascript and CSS all you have a series of pages that are more or less exactly the same and don’t actually do anything.

In effect, like a lot of comparison sites, they are a content scraper and aggregator. Unlike the best comparison sites, they haven’t really brought much to the table beyond a labyrinthine navigation and tonne of affiliate links. In this market that kind of comes with the territory, but sites like Money Supermarket have invested heavily in branding and community building in order to offset those problems and the result is pretty clear.

You can hear a little hint of exasperation in Julie Holtz’s post on the Google Publicity blog.

“Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case. We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users’ interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments.”

The fact is that Google is really only competitive in the search sphere. It has interesting offers in various markets (I use Google Docs at home, have a Gmail account etc) but while many of the company’s product launches are accompanied by a blitz of hype, I don’t see Orkut threatening Facebook any time soon and my Google Wave account is mainly full of tumbleweeds.

So is Google’s 80% share of the European search market a monopoly as such? Technically, it probably is. But is it really the EU’s job to define what the market should be? After all, Bing is only over there and Microsoft aren’t exactly short of marketing muscle. If Bing’s excellent vertical search services work well in Europe then people will start to migrate across. By contemplating an investigation in Google, it’s hard not to feel that the EU is in thrall to special-interest pleading from people who would like lots of traffic thanks, but aren’t prepared to work with the standards that Google sets for itself.

Mind you, given their past track record, don’t be surprised to see a legally enforced banner on Google’s homepage saying “try Bing!” in five years time.

paul carpenter