Google Submits Proposals to Resolve European Antitrust Concerns

European officials were not willing early Friday to describe the proposals, and Google could not immediately be reached for comment. But it has been expected that Google will offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities are unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The European Commission, the executive agency of the European Union, has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January that the company had not broken antitrust laws after a 19-month inquiry into how it operated its search engine.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company would avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.

Mr. Almunia must first assess the offer made by Google and then decide whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently to allow the complainants to review it during a period of what is known as “market testing.”

In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that concerned European regulators. In one, Google will allow rivals to opt out of allowing Google to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. Google was expected to agree to the same terms with European authorities.

But in a second area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own content in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.

Mr. Almunia has also demanded that Google put fewer restrictions the way it handles advertisements that are displayed alongside search results when a user types a query in a Web site’s search box.

The deadline for Google to submit the proposals by Thursday, the final day of January, was set in mid-December, when Mr. Almunia, after a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, asked for “a detailed commitment text in January 2013.”

While Google is the dominant search engine in the United States, it holds even greater sway in Europe, accounting for more than 90 percent of searches in a number of major markets. That is one factor giving the Europeans greater leverage in trying to set rules on how Google ranks competing services.

Another factor is European antitrust law, which has long given competitors more protection than U.S. law provides.

Some experts have said that U.S. authorities could be playing a tactically clever hand by allowing the Europeans to push Google an extra mile. They suggested that the F.T.C. would be shielded from accusations it was attacking a U.S. champion, even though any concessions Google made to the Europeans on search could end up applying globally.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/business/global/google-submits-proposals-to-resolve-european-antitrust-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss