Thursday, March 28

Germany: Government investigates Google for monopolistic practices


From the German antitrust entity they determined that the owner of Google, Alphabet, met the scale threshold required for a company to be subject to the new supervisory powers it acquired last year to regulate large internet companies.

“We have already started to look more closely at Google’s processing of personal data and the issue of Google News Showcase,” said the chairman of the antitrust authority, Andreas Mundt.

“At the same time, we intensively advance processes against Amazon, Apple and Meta, owner of Facebook“, he added.

“The Federal Competition Office can now address concrete forms of behavior that harm competition,” said Andreas Mundt.

The antitrust office was strengthened at the beginning of 2021 for a law that allows you to more easily determine a dominant market position of a company and then intervene to prevent practices that undermine competition.

Mund had previously said that this would allow his office to proceed against practices that undermine free competition by large digital consortiums.

In Germany, Google has a 80% market share among internet search engines. It also has a dominant position in the advertising sector related to Internet searches and other services.

Google also has great influence on other companies’ access to its users and advertising clients, according to the antitrust office, with which it can impose certain rules and conditions.

This allows us to consider that Google services have the character of an infrastructure. The bureau began examining Google’s use of personal data in May of last year and the selection of news offered in Google News Showcase in June.



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