The European Commission has launched a new investigation into Google regarding how the tech giant ranks media publishers' content in search results, in accordance with EU rules for large tech companies, UNN reports with reference to Euractiv.
Details
The investigation into Google under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) will assess whether Google is downgrading news agencies and other publisher sites that host sponsored or commercial content. According to the tech giant, this practice falls under its "site reputation abuse policy."
Google claims that this policy is necessary as a spam fighting measure to combat third-party pages that "abuse search rankings" by leveraging the host site's ranking.
However, the European Commission stated that the new DMA investigation will assess whether Google's policy restricts publishers' ability to do business with third-party providers and monetize their websites and content.
"We will investigate to ensure that news publishers do not lose important revenue at a difficult time for the industry," said EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera in a press release.
An official representative of the European Commission told journalists on Thursday that the investigation does not concern Google's spam policy in general, but focuses on how Google's site reputation abuse policy could have affected its obligations to publishers.
In response to the European Commission's statement, Google called the policy "necessary" to combat "deceptive pay-to-play tactics" that degrade search results.
"This unexpected new investigation threatens to reward unscrupulous players and degrade the quality of search results," Google's chief scientist Pandu Nayak wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
If the European Commission concludes that Google has violated the DMA, the company could be fined up to 10% of its global turnover and could face further penalties for any subsequent violations.
Addition
In addition, back in March, the European Commission conducted a preliminary investigation into Google, during which it made a preliminary finding that the company violated self-preferencing rules in search and anti-navigation in the Play app store.
However, the company has not yet received any fines.
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