Neither the company nor European officials were willing on Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But Google has been expected to offer revisions to the way it conducts its search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that its activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.
The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity while the agreement was still under discussion.
Google’s competitors did not take a wait-and-see attitude. After filing a new complaint against Google on Thursday, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.
“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, said in a statement.
Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called Hot-map.com and a member of Icomp who is based in Germany, said he hoped Google’s offer would be “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.”
Icomp’s new antitrust complaint contended that Google was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.
If critics of Google in Europe remain dissatisfied, they can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and accuse it of failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Final judgments in such cases can take years.
Google reached one settlement on Friday. In France, it agreed to pay 60 million euros, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.
The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than has the United States Federal Trade Commission. The F.T.C. decided in January that Google had not broken antitrust laws after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine.
Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and the top European 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 will avoid further investigation. Additional inquiry could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of Google’s annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding, which could restrict its activities in Europe.
“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said on Friday.
Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference on Friday that Google had sent a detailed proposal that the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.
There is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, so negotiations could continue.
“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.
Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.
The next stage for Mr. Almunia is to assess Google’s offer and decide whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently. Then he will invite another, formal submission from the company, which would be sent to the complainants for review.
Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting from San Francisco.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/business/global/google-submits-proposals-to-resolve-european-antitrust-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss