A special set of rules
The European Commission has notified search giant Google that it has received complaints from three different sources about the way it ranks sites that compete with Google offerings. The allegation seems to be that Google pushes competitors down the list of search results.
Two of the complainants are price comparison sites - UK-based Foundem and Microsoft-owned Ciao - and the third is a French legal search engine - ejustice.fr. The price comparison sites are claiming that product search results are unfairly dominated by results that are of direct commercial benefit to Google, to the exclusion on their own.
We had a quick search for iPhone and it revealed the results below. As you can see, there are a bunch of sponsored results which, while it could be clearer, are identified. Then we get two Apple results, and then two more sets of Google offerings: Google Products and Google News. Both of these presumably benefit Google and are promoted above all other results by the company. In fact, there are only two 'neutral' results on the whole visible page.
None of this would necessarily be an issue if Google didn't have such a large proportion of the search market - thought to be 90 percent in the UK. The EC actions against Microsoft and Intel in recent years have been founded on the premise that near-monopolists have to obey a special set of rules.
