Google under EU scanner for suppressing competition

The European regulator yesterday launched formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Internet giant Google abused its dominant position to suppress competition by using penalty filters to place certain sites from its search results so far down the rankings that they would never be found.

The Brussels-based anti-trust regulator The European Commission (EC) has asked Google to explain how its search engine operates as well as questioned the way it sells advertising.

The EC will also look at allegations that Google imposes "exclusivity obligations" on advertising partners preventing them from placing "certain types of competing ads on their web sites.''

The investigation comes after the EC received complaints from three companies, a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and Microsoft-owned shopping site Ciao.

The three companies have alleged unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services.

Foundem had said in a blog post in August 2010, ''Google has always used various penalty filters to remove certain sites entirely from its search results or place them so far down the rankings that they will never be found.