Brussels, 22/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - An additional complaint about abuse of dominant position (Art.102 TFEU) regarding Google Inc. was submitted to the Commission on 22 February by the French company 1plusV, the creator of a series of vertical search engines. This company believes that it is the victim of a strategy of foreclosure pursued by Google against vertical search engines on the market of natural search rankings, online advertising linked to searches (including online ad intermediation) and in the sector of the production and marketing of search technologies. This is the second complaint brought by the company against the American giant, following the one tabled in February 2010, when it complained about repeated delistings of the pages of its vertical search engine Ejustice.fr. Amongst other elements, this first complaint led the Commission to open an in-depth investigation into Google's practices on 30 November 2010 (EUROPE 10267 and 10288).
More specifically, in its current complaint, 1plusV seeks to inform the Commission of a series of new abuses, which include: - coupling its advertising service AdSense for Search (AFS) to its Google CSE technology (development and publication of vertical searches on websites or intranet). 1plusV argues that this practice obliges rival vertical search engines to abandon their own technology, which in some cases is more effective, to adopt the CSE technology and in particular, greatly limits the possibility for these to be referenced on Google Web, and therefore to attract traffic and generate advertising revenue. Google has launched an uncoupled advertising service (Adsense for Search Only), but at the moment, this is reserved for sites selected by it; - Google's failure to respect the listing rules. Google, 1plusV argues, pursues abusive referencing practices, ignoring explicit instructions not to list sites or pages; - multi-discriminatory automatic listings by the arbitrary, preferential-position linking to pages from its own specialist vertical search engine, Google Books; - Google's reprisals against it: after its complaint of February 2010, the company claims that Google delisted other sites published by 1plusV, including most of the pages of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), which is believed, as a result of this, to have ceased working with the eGuides service of 1plusV to conclude' pages shortly after the Commission opened its investigation, too much of a coincidence for 1plusV.
1plusV's complaint will no doubt feed into the investigation underway by the Commission which, shortly before Christmas, sent a questionnaire to various players on the web, such as website publishers, search engines and online directories, advertisers and marketers, to be returned by 11 February (EUROPE 10288). (F.G./transl.fl)