According to FT.com, The EU competition chief Joaquín Almunia told Google today is going to have to change its presents it search results in Europe or face anti-trust charges in the EU for diverting traffic to its own services.
We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic,” Mr Almunia told the Financial Times.
“They are monetizing this kind of business, the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think – I fear – there is an abuse of this dominant position.
This is a completely different result than the US regulatory the FTC came up with two weeks when they said they would be dropping its investigation of Google saying:
“We exhaustively investigated whether [Google] uses search bias” to push its own products higher and rivals’ down the search results. But after nearly two years, he said, “the commission has voted to close this investigation. Although some evidence suggested it was trying to remove competition, the primary reason was to improve the user experience.
do no evil
This is old news…….