Rivals of Google’s search engine demand that EU lawmakers enforce new tech rules to make Google comply with an earlier ruling.
DuckDuckGo, Germany’s Ecosia and French peers Qwant and Lilo urged EU lawmakers to take action against Google via new tech rules. As reported in Reuters, the competing platforms say they have yet to see positive results from an earlier EC antitrust ruling against Google.
In 2018, the European Commission levied a record 4.24- billion-euro fine on Google for unfairly using Android to cement the dominance of its search engine. The Commission also ordered the Alphabet tech unit to ensure a level playing field for rivals.
In response, Google made some changes. In addition, four months ago they said they would let rivals compete for free to be the default search engines on Android devices in Europe.
Rivals say Google made cosmetic changes that did not fix the problem
“Despite recent changes, we do not believe it will move market share significantly due to its persisting limitations,” Googles rivals said in a joint letter to European Parliament lawmakers.
They explained that a preference menu that let users choose their search default when setting up an Android device is not available on Chrome desktop or on other operating systems. Moreover, the choice option is only shown to users once.
“The DMA should enshrine in law a requirement for a search engine preference menu that would effectively ban Google from acquiring default search access points of the operating systems and the browsers of gatekeepers,” they said.
The DMA may come into force in 2023 once it gets the green light from EU lawmakers and EU countries.
6 hours ago
