Leading lawyer questions EC's case against Google

Suggests search giant may well beat EC antitrust rap

The European Commission's case against Google is not as strong as the recent antitrust cases it had against either Intel or Microsoft, according to a leading competition lawyer.

The case, which was opened on Tuesday, is the result of allegations that the search engine has been acting in an anti-competitve way.

The allegations come from UK price comparison site foundem.co.uk, Microsoft-owned online shopping service Ciao and French legal search engine ejustice.fr, with all complainants suggesting their sites would rank higher in search results if the algorithms were not unfairly weighted towards Google's own services.

Gustaf Duhs, head of competition for law firm Stevens & Bolton, explained that although in terms of market share Google is certainly dominant, with 80 per cent, the barriers to market entry are low, meaning it is not obviously stymieing competition.

"As Google itself says, the competition [such as Microsoft's Bing] is only a click away," he explained. The Microsoft vs EC case was quite different because Microsoft was actually supressing competition because it didn't supply companies with sufficient information about its products to allow them to develop compatible products. The company was fined a total of close to €1.7bn.

Intel was also charged with hampering competition, when the company was found guilty of illegally suppressing its competitor AMD's sales by, for example, offering discounts to retailers that did not stock its competitor's chips. Intel was fined €1.06bn.

One strand of the investigation is expected to look into how much prominence is given to competing advertisers on Google.

Duhs said: "To argue that Google has some form of obligation to its advertising competitors goes quite far. This would not be expected under normal market conditions. To some extent this is Google being undone by its success."

If found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, Google could be fined up to 10 per cent of its $23bn (£15bn) annual revenues.