European Commission investigates allegations that Google acted ‘anti-competitively’ in ranking of rivals’ sites on its natural search results

The European Commission is investigating allegations that Google has acted anti-competitively over the way it has been ranking search results. Three businesses have complained to the Commission that their rankings have been demoted because they are commercial rivals of Google. They therefore claim that the search engine giant – which is responsible for about 90% of Internet searches across the world – has been abusing its dominant position in the market, contrary to European Union competition law. The complainants are UK search engine Foundem; French search engine ejustice.fr; and Ciao, the price comparison site which has been owned by Microsoft since 2008 and which prior to that had had a good relationship with Google. Google denies any wrong-doing and says that penalties to filter out unwanted traffic and rankings are reserved for spam or sites seeking to cheat Google’s algorithms. For example, Google removed BMW’s site from its search results four years ago because the search engine did not like the car manufacturer’s search engine optimisation techniques.