EU competition officials are showing signs of preparing a new antitrust case against Google, the Financial Times reports. In recent weeks the regulator had contact with companies that have complained in the past about unfair competition from Google. The European Commission asked for permission to publish extracts from the confidential complaints lodged by rivals, according to two people who received the requests.
Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who has represented several Google rivals, said the request to use the information publicly could only mean the EC was preparing to include it in a Commission complaint against Google. An undisclosed number of his clients had received the requests, he said.
According to an executive at another company that had been approached by the EC, the extracts the regulators want to publish focus on Google’s competition with so-called “vertical”, or specialised, search services, such as comparison shopping sites, travel search engines and sites for finding local services. Rivals accuse Google of giving preferential treatment to search results from its own services. Google declined to comment.
