According to the European Commission inspection results, Google will have to pay 10% of the amount of the annual income. The reason for this punishment is Google’s abuse of dominance. It gives its own services preferential treatment and ranks search results. Moreover, it uses the contents created by other companies without paying any compensation. Google also banned the site owners from using the third-party ads. The European Commission is going to thoroughly monitor the corporation activity during a month. If any incompliance with the honest business conduct principles is found, Google will be under the antitrust investigation.
Google has put forward a number of proposals that can help ease some of the sanctions imposed by the European Commission. The company agreed to label the Google services’ links. Google also will remove the restrictions on advertising and provide the news sites with the opportunity of indicating articles, page by page, to include in the Google news.
In January, the Federal Trade Commission made a similar claim, but after some concessions made by Google, the company was exonerated from part of the accusations.
Unlike the United States, the European Commission intends to act much more severely. Its official website says that the market situation and legal regulations in the U.S. and Europe are very different. For example, 30% of online search services in the U.S. are provided by Bing and Yahoo!, meanwhile in Europe Google processes about 90% of requests.
If Google does not make concessions, the world can soon see two Google systems: the one for the EU countries and the other one for all the rest.