Kludge
11-30-2010, 04:05 PM
They just happen to be American-based.
"The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google unfairly gives preference to its own services over that of competing vertical search services in search results. The investigation was sparked by complaints from other search service providers that Google ranks their results much lower in both unpaid and paid results rankings, and uses its overarching dominance in online search to plug its own services instead.
The EC plans to look into a number of confounding factors that it believes could result in anticompetitive behavior. One is how Google ranks its own vertical search services, such as price comparisons, against that of competing services. Another is how Google assigns "Quality Scores" to services that pay for sponsored search results—companies that provide these services allege that Google has lowered their Quality Score when Google has its own competing service."
More @ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/google-search-goes-under-eu-antitrust-microscope.ars
"The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google unfairly gives preference to its own services over that of competing vertical search services in search results. The investigation was sparked by complaints from other search service providers that Google ranks their results much lower in both unpaid and paid results rankings, and uses its overarching dominance in online search to plug its own services instead.
The EC plans to look into a number of confounding factors that it believes could result in anticompetitive behavior. One is how Google ranks its own vertical search services, such as price comparisons, against that of competing services. Another is how Google assigns "Quality Scores" to services that pay for sponsored search results—companies that provide these services allege that Google has lowered their Quality Score when Google has its own competing service."
More @ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/google-search-goes-under-eu-antitrust-microscope.ars