Google Inc, owner of the world’s most popular internet search engine, may be the subject of an extended European Union investigation after three companies, including a Microsoft Corp unit, filed antitrust complaints.
A UK price-comparison site called Foundem, a French legal search engine called Ejustice.fr and a Microsoft service called Ciao From Bing have filed competition complaints to the European Commission, Google said on Wednesday in a blog posting. The EU said it hasn’t opened a formal probe in the case yet.
The commission has targeted US tech companies before. Microsoft has been fined a total of 1.68 billion euros ($2.27 billion) and agreed to give consumers a choice of browsers to end a separate EU probe over its internet Explorer. Intel Corp, the world’s biggest computer-chip maker, was fined 1.06 billion euros in May.
“European antitrust authorities are certainly something to watch out for,” said John Eastwood, a partner at Taipei- based international law firm Eiger Law who’s not familiar with the Google case. “Unlike the US, which seems subject to political whims, with the Europeans if they feel there’s something to a case they’ll surely sink their teeth into it.”
The Brussels-based commission confirmed it is reviewing the three complaints against Google.
“The commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being,” the EU said in an emailed statement. “As is usual when the commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations.”
The EU investigation wasn’t the only unwelcome legal development for Mountain View, California-based Google in Europe. One former Google executive and two current managers at the company were found guilty of privacy violations by an Italian court over in a case over a clip uploaded to the company’s Google Video site in 2006.
