Uh-oh, it looks like Google could be in some serious legal trouble over in the EU. The EU’s antitrust regulator has decided that they will be filing formal charges against Google for allegedly violating the EU’s antitrust laws, or at least that’s what sources are saying. This filing is said to be the result of a 5-year investigation that is said to be as big as the one faced by Microsoft about a decade ago.
Apparently this has something to do with Google’s dominance in the search industry. Antitrust regulators believe that Google is abusing their dominant position in the industry to favor their own vertical search services, and assuming that this is true, Google could be faced with heavy fines and possibly an injunction regarding its business practices, according to Ioannis Lianos who is a professor of global competition law at the University College London.
According to Lianos, “If they’re moving ahead [with formal charges] after five years, it means they have really strong views about the case. It means that [EU regulators] don’t want to settle the case, they want to adopt an infringement decision.” Once the formal charges have been filed, Google will then have 3 months to respond and could also request a hearing, after which a final decision will be made by the end of the year.
This will no doubt be bad news for Google in terms of publicity, not to mention if the EU does rule that Google has abused their dominance, then checks on Google’s other services could also be looked into, or it could also see other countries start to launch antitrust investigations of their own.