Almost all Web searches in India go through Google, with help from the fact that most smartphones in India run on Google’s Android operating system. This charge is backed by Indian e-commerce company Flipkart, which is among the 30 businesses that responded to the commission’s inquiry into Google’s practices.
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Shardul Amarchand represented Bharat Matrimony and Consumer Unity and Trust Society that filed the original complaint against Google. Google has time till September 10 to file its response to the findings and present itself before the seven-member commission headed by Chairman Ashok Chawla, a week later.
The report also says that sponsored links shown in search results depend on the amount of advertising money Google receives from its clients.
India’s competition watchdog has voiced preliminary concerns that Google Inc. has violated the country’s antitrust rules as the search giant continues to fight a formal complaint about its shopping search in Europe. Like Google Hotels gets preference over other travel portals that may have higher traffic and therefore mathematically more appropriate as first results of a search.
The EC said in a statement they will carefully consider Google’s response before taking any decision on how to proceed.
“Regulators and courts around the world, including in the US, Germany, Taiwan, Egypt, and Brazil, have looked into and found no concerns on numerous issues raised in this report”.
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The CCI has cited example of a UK website, Ciao!, which slipped to the second page of search results from one of the top results overnight. The public response from the tech firm was in reply to a strong missive sent out by the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager earlier in the month. Google’s using foreign arbitration clauses in case of disputes is also considered abuse of dominance, according to the report. According to data on the same site, Google has held more meetings with EU officials than any other companysince last November- 32 in all, although only one of these officially had to do with the antitrust case, which hasdevelopedsince 2010. It is clear that Google has been under a lot of similar accusations around the globe, but unfortunately Google still hasn’t addressed any of them, leaving the different antitrust authorities to freely investigate the allegations, which could lead to a fine of up to 10 percent of Google’s total income.
