Three years after it first opened its investigation, The European Commission has turned down Google’s latest antitrust settlement proposals again. This is at least the second time the EU Commission has said no to Google’s evolving settlement offer. European Union competition Chief Joaquin Almunia said that Google’s latest proposals “are not proposals that can eliminate our concerns regarding competition.”
The regulator opened its antitrust investigation into the Google corporation in 2010 after a number of price comparison companies accused Google of unfairly down ranking competitors in search results. This means that they will have to revise their proposals again if it wants to avoid big fines or even worse sanctions. The EU’s competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, in a Spanish interview conducted from his office has reported that according to Bloomberg news the offer presented by Google was “not acceptable.”
According to Engadget to escape a possible fine of up to $5 billion, Google previously offered to include more labeling of links that promote its own services like Shopping, to indicate that they were promoted placements, but they were rejected. Google was founded back in 1995 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they met at Stanford University. By 1996, they had built a search engine, initially called BackRub, which used links to determine the importance of individual webpages. “The ball is still in Google’s court,” says EU chief, Joaquin Almunia, but the Commission will be the one to decide.
Image Credit: www.afr.com