The European Commission announced this Thursday (13) that it will open an investigation into Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to determine whether it violated the European Digital Markets Law (DMA) by discriminating against media sites in its search results.
The news was released by the European Executive in a statement, in which it added that its previous monitoring work “revealed evidence that Google, based on its ‘website reputation abuse policy’, is degrading the websites and content of media and other publishers in Google search results when these websites include content from commercial partners”.
According to the European Commission, the investigation will focus on this “policy of abuse of the website’s reputation”, as it “appears to directly affect a common and legitimate way that media outlets have to monetize their websites and content”.
Additionally, the investigation aims to determine whether Alphabet’s alleged discrimination in Google search results affects the freedom of these sites to carry out “legitimate commercial activities, innovate and cooperate with third-party content providers”.
According to information from Reuters, Google denied discrimination and stated that its anti-spam policy prevents sites from using deceptive tactics to obtain more results in searches than sites that compete based on merit.
The company also claimed that the EU investigation risks compromising the quality of search results on the platform.
“The investigation announced today into our anti-spam efforts is misguided and risks harming millions of European users,” said Pandu Nayak, chief scientist at Google Search.
“And the investigation is unfounded: a German court has already rejected a similar claim, ruling that our anti-spam policy was valid, reasonable and consistently applied,” he added.
Punishments for the company if the investigation finds evidence of violation of European legislation can be a fine of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover or 20% in the case of repeated violations. The European Executive predicts that the investigation will be completed within a year.
