In response to allegations of violating antitrust laws in Europe, the corporate conglomerate Google has launched a 130 page counterattack against the European Union’s plan to file charges.
The charges presented by the European Union Commission are based on the popular suspicion that Google uses its dominant position in providing online search results in order to systematically favor its own shopping services.
Many people using the Android operating system from Google on their mobile phones receive search results that direct people toward other services that are also offered by the company.
The investigation has been ongoing since April, when the chief competition regulator for the European Union Margrethe Vestager accused Google of abusing its dominant position in providing search engine results in an illegal fashion.
Additionally, Vestager says that the parent company for Google, Alphabet, might face more antitrust charges in the near future.
Indeed, Google is being investigated on a variety of fronts beyond simply using its dominant search engine and operating system to manipulate search results. The company is also under fire for certain web-scraping allegations.
Vestager says that looking into Google is a “high priority” for the competition commission.
Meanwhile, Google says that there is “no basis” for these accusations of the company violating antitrust laws.
Google’s lawyers wrote in a legal response, “The theory on which the EU’s preliminary conclusions rest is so ambiguous that the Commission itself concluded three times that the concern had been resolved.”
Vestager says that each individual investigation against Google is different, and the only thing that share in terms of similarities is that they affect the same company.
She said, “What they have in common is that the name Google appears in each one, but apart from that they are very different. And therefore I do not think of it as one Google case but literally as different investigations and different cases.”
For now, it’s clear that the EU wants to come down particularly hard on Google.
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