On Monday, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other allied companies launched a new effort aimed at convincing European antitrust officials to force Google to stop promoting its own online services at the expense of its competitors.
A new websites has been introduced by the companies, called Focus on the User, which explains their mandate and where the concern stems from that Google is making it more difficult for searchers to discover competing services.
The other companies involved include German health advertising portal Jameda, the Swiss travel site HolidayCheck, and a few consumer groups, including Consumer Watchdog and Fight for the Future.
Their website states:
The European Commission is weighing its options to ensure that consumers searching using Google can access all websites, not just content powered by Google+. We think the best way to do that is using Google’s own organic search algorithm to identify the most relevant results — regardless of their source — from across the Web.
Here’s a video put together for the website the helps to further explain how these companies believe Google is doing a disservice to its web search users:
European Union antitrust officials have been investigating complaints that Complaints have been filed against Google, that European Union antitrust officials are looking into, which claim the company is taking advantage of its overwhelming market share in EU and tweaking its algorithm to display its own products first.
Google has made three attempts to settle the E.U.’s antitrust concerns, but they have yet to make an offer that has been accepted by the Europeans.
For now, the Europeans and Google’s rivals are mostly waiting for Google to make yet another settlement proposal later this year.
In the meantime, I’d like to hear your thoughts. Do you think these companies have a legitimate case against Google? Is Google actually making a conscious effort to bury its competitors? Let me know what you think in the comments section.
