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Google has denied European Union charges that it tilts searches for shopping to favour its own service, saying that the EU has failed to see that its competition comes from companies like eBay and Amazon.
While neither Amazon nor eBay offer Web search facilities, Google nevertheless insisted "online shopping is robustly competitive, with lots of evidence supporting the common-sense conclusion that Google and many other websites are chasing Amazon, by far the largest player on the field".
The statements came in an official response to the EU charges. It was made in the name of Kent Walker (below, right), senior vice-president and general counsel of the search engine behemoth.
Back in April, the EU accused Google of cheating competitors by distorting search results to favour its own shopping service.
{loadposition sam08}Over five years, the EU found Google that gave prominence to its own comparison shopping services, even if they were irrelevant to the search query. In the process, traffic was shunted away from competitors.
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The EU also has investigations running into Google's alleged dominance in mobile operating systems, where Android dominates the field, and the company's alleged unfair tactics to dominate the Web search market.
Walker wrote: "The Commission... argued that because sites like Amazon sometimes pay price comparison aggregator sites for referred traffic, they can’t also be considered rivals. But many companies simultaneously compete and co-operate.
"And, in fact, Amazon gets only a tiny fraction of its traffic from these services, hardly enough to support the idea they don’t compete with price comparison sites and a range of other Internet shopping services."
Walker also opened up what could be another front for the EU to attack the company, pointing out "merchants are reaching consumers directly like never before. On the mobile web — and more than half of Europe’s Internet traffic is mobile these days — dedicated apps are the most common way for consumers to shop".
Google's dominance of mobile search is even greater than its dominance of desktop search, hence why Walker raised this point is unknown.
"There is simply no meaningful correlation between the evolution of our search services and the performance of price comparison sites," Walker said.
"Meanwhile, over (the last) 10 years, a rapidly increasing amount of traffic flowed from our search pages to popular sites like Amazon and eBay as they expanded in Europe, hardly a sign of our 'favouring' our own ads."
The Bloomberg news service quoted Thomas Vinje, a lawyer with Clifford Chance, as saying: "“When consumers look at Google ads they do not get the best, most relevant results. Instead, they get results from advertisers willing to pay Google the most money."
