“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for ICOMP, a group backed by Microsoft, said in a statement.
Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called hot-map.com, based in Germany, said he hoped the offer by Google was “enough to restore competition” but, “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”
Companies that have complained against Google in Europe will have the option to sue the European Commission, the Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Such cases can take years to reach a final judgment.
Neither the company nor European officials were willing Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But it had been expected that Google would 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 commission 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.
“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said Friday.
Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, told a news conference Friday that Google had sent “a detailed proposal,” which the commission was analyzing before taking any further steps.
But there is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, meaning negotiations could continue.
“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” said Mr. Colombani.
Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a Statement of Objections, which is the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been seeking to avoid because he favors non-litigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.
A European antitrust case against Microsoft eventually resulted in penalties and fines totaling more than $2 billion, but the process lasted about a decade. During that period, a number of competitors complained that they were losing out to Microsoft and warned that the European process was too slow.
The next stage for Mr. Almunia in the case against Google is to assess the latest offer made by the company and then take a final view as to whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently and then invite another, formal submission from the company that would be sent to complainants for review during a period of what is known as market testing.
“We are not at this stage,” said Mr. Colombani, the spokesman, referring to the stage of market testing. “We are in discussions with Google and in the context of these discussions we have just received their proposal.”
In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that coincided with the concerns of European regulators. In one, Google will allow rivals to opt out of allowing the company to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. Google was expected to agree to the same terms with European authorities.
But in another area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own products and services in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.
The European Consumer Organization, which includes consumer groups from across Europe, called last year for a settlement that would limit Google’s freedom to favor its own services, like maps and shopping sites, in search rankings.
But Google is expected to resist a solution that would tamper with the way it ranks search results that it deems most relevant to consumers. Google also is likely to be wary that any concessions it makes in Europe could lead regulators elsewhere in the world to demand much the same.
Mr. Almunia has also continued to press Google to put fewer restrictions on the way it handles advertisements that are displayed alongside search results when a user types a query in a Web site’s search box. That is another area of Google’s business that was not addressed by the settlement in the United States.
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.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/business/global/google-submits-proposals-to-resolve-european-antitrust-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss