Back in April, the EU filed an anti-trust case against the search engine giant, Google. The company has been pretty quiet about the case, until now. In a recent interview with Politico, Google’s President of EMEA Business and operations, Matt Brittin, spoke about the case. The company admitted their own faults in the anti-trust case as well. Brittin’s position is actually rather new for Google, and was created to help unify Google’s business operations in Europe. Google did admit that they aren’t perfect, and are dismissive of the charges that it abused its position as the dominant search engine in Europe.
“We don’t always get it right,” Brittin stated. “As far as Europe is concerned: we get it. We understand that people here are not the same in their attitudes to everything as people in America.”
The charges from the EU Commission are about how Google promotes its own shopping service within search results. Google shows them at the top of the page, while non-paying rivals are listed far below. The EU Commissioner, Vestager, stated that her services are still probing other concerns including complaints over Google’s advertising business, its maps service and also its Android smartphone operating system, which is arguably it’s most popular product, aside from search.
“There is no evidence that consumers have been harmed here, and actually no evidence that complainants have been harmed,” Said Brittin. He also pointed out that many of the complainants “are US companies or backed by US companies.”
We’ll likely be hearing more about this anti-trust case in the next few weeks and months, as the commission tells its side of the story. What Brittin said is on point though, the attitudes of people in Europe are not the same as those in the US, and it’s the same with other countries as well. That’s something companies have to remember when they are expanding to other parts of the world, even with smartphone manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE which are looking to make a splash in the US this year by selling their phones directly to consumers.