Streetmap says its complaint mirrors
a 3-year-old antitrust probe by EU into whether Google favors its own services
over competitors in search results
London: Google Inc, operator of the world’s largest
search engine, was sued in London by a UK Internet company for promoting its
own maps over those of competitors in what it claimed was Google’s cynical
manipulation of search results.
Streetmap,
a provider of Internet maps, filed a complaint in London 15 March, according to
court records. Google’s actions have made its products harder to find, the
UK-based company alleged on Wednesday in a statement. It’s at least the second
such lawsuit filed against Google since June.
Streetmap
said its complaint mirrors a three-year-old antitrust probe by the European
Union into whether Google favors its own services over competitors in search
results.
The
European commission has asked Mountain View, California-based Google to submit
proposals that could lead to a settlement. Meanwhile, EU privacy probes of the
company are accelerating.
We
have had to take this action in an effort to protect our business and attract
attention to those that, like us, have started their own technology businesses,
only to find them damaged by Google’s cynical manipulation of search results, Kate Sutton, commercial director of Streetmap,
said in the statement.
Tom Price, a spokesman for Google, declined to
comment today on the allegations, saying in an e-mailed statement that he hadn’t
seen the complaint.
Foundem
suit
In
June, Google was sued in London by a UK Internet company that previously filed
a complaint with EU regulators, sparking the antitrust probe.
Foundem,
a UK shopping comparison website, sought damages for revenue lost as a result
of Google’s anti-competitive conduct, lawyers for Foundem said in court
documents.
Foundem
said in the lawsuit that it had been unfairly penalized by Google because it
offers a competing shopping comparison search service. It lost web traffic as a
result of being pushed down in Google’s search rankings.
Price,
the Google spokesman, declined to comment on the suit when it was made public
in January.
EU
competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia has sought a deal with Google to
end the antitrust probe without imposing fines, while competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and TripAdvisor Inc. have tried to pressure
regulators to force Google to change its business practices.
The
US government ended an investigation into Google in January, saying there was
no evidence the company’s actions harmed consumers.
Al Verney, a Brussels-based spokesman for Google,
said last month in an e-mailed statement that the company is working with the
European commission.
EU
probe
The
EU in 2010 began investigating claims Google discriminated against other
services in its search results and stopped some websites from accepting
competitors’ ads after receiving complaints from Microsoft and others.
While
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft and partner Yahoo! Inc. have about a quarter of the US
Web-search market, Google has almost 95% of the traffic in Europe, Microsoft
said in a blog post in 2011, citing data from regulators.
Internet
traffic can be diverted by manipulating the order of search results, said Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford
University’s Graduate School of Business and a Microsoft consultant, in a blog
post on Microsoft’s website last month.
When
a site is moved from the first position to the 10th position in a series of
search results, it typically will lose about 85% of its traffic, she said.
Impartiality
of search results will become all the more important in the years to come,
given that screen sizes on smartphones and tablets are smaller than on
traditional PCs, Athey said.
Smaller
screens mean there is even less room for competing services to appear in
Google’s mobile search, she said.
Privacy
front
Google
faces possible fines on another front in Europe, after six European Union data
protection regulators started coordinated enforcement measures over the
company’s failure to fix flaws in a new privacy policy.
A
joint decision 2 April followed a deadlock at a 19 March meeting between Google
and the data watchdogs, France’s national commission for computing and civil
liberties said in a statement on its website. It’s now up to national
regulators to pursue the company according to their own rules and powers, CNIL
said.
Privacy
investigations
Google
faces privacy investigations by authorities around the world as it debuts new
services and steps up competition with Facebook Inc. for users and advertisers.
Google
last year changed its system to create a uniform set of policies for more than
60 products, unleashing criticism from regulators and consumer advocates
concerned it isn’t protecting data it collects.
Our
privacy policy respects European law, Verney, the spokesman for Google, has
said. We have engaged fully with the data protection authorities involved
throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward.
The
UK’s privacy watchdog said in a separate statement it started an investigation
into whether Google’s revised March 2012 privacy policy is compliant with the
Data Protection Act.
The
case is Streetmap.eu Ltd. v. Google Inc., case no 13- 1013, High Court of
Justice, Chancery Division. Bloomberg
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