Microsoft files EU antitrust complaint against Google

The software giant accuses Google of a string of anti-competitive actions

Microsoft has filed an antitrust complaint to the European Commission accusing Google of violating competition law in the search engine market.

Google currently has about 95 per cent of the search engine market in Europe, whereas in the US Microsoft serves about a quarter of the population with Bing or Yahoo.

"As troubling as the situation is in the Unites States, it is worse in Europe," Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

"That is why our filing focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in the markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of European consumers."

Smith gave a number of examples of what he described as Google acting in an anti-competitive manner:

• In 2006 Google acquired YouTube, and since then, according to Microsoft, it has put in place a number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results.

• In 2010 it says Google blocked Microsoft's Windows Phone from properly operating with YouTube.

• The software giant alleges Google is seeking to block access to content owned by book publishers, which would give it exclusive access to books where no copyright holder can be found.

• Microsoft claims Google makes it more difficult for its customers to advertise through other search engines. When advertisers input data into Google's ad servers, it prohibits them from using it in an interoperable way with other search advertising platforms. This effectively makes it more expensive to run campaigns with other competitors, Microsoft says.

"The stakes are high for the European economy," wrote Smith.

"Indeed, the European Commission's Digital Agenda made clear that commerce is moving online, where two-thirds of Europeans begin their shopping process," he added.

"It's therefore critical that search engines and online advertising move forward in an open, fair and competitive manner."

Google does not appear to be too concerned with the proceedings, based on a statement to the Wall Street Journal:

"We're not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries [Caio.de] was one of the original complainants. For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works."

The complaints that prompted Microsoft to investigate the issue came from Ciao.de, a German subsidiary of Microsoft.

"We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate. But it shouldn't be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives," said Smith.

"That's what it's doing now. And that's what we hope the European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop."