Yahoo's Mayer Apologizes for Mail Outage

 

 http://demingcircle.blogspot.tw/2013/12/179-180.html

 

 

New Antitrust Chill for Google

By
• Rolfe Winkler
• CONNECT

AFP

The Financial Post reported Friday that Canada’s Competition Bureau will proceed with a formal inquiry into the search giant’s advertising and search practices after preliminary probe suggested to local authorities that Google may be abusing its dominant position on the web.
According to a document filed earlier this week with Canadian Federal Court, the Competition Bureau believes Google has engaged in anti-competitive practices with respect to deals it has struck to distribute search results. It also is accused of favoring its own “vertical services” that facilitate searches in certain categories such as Google News, and of restrictions on the use of data from its AdWords advertising platform that would allow users to transfer their ad campaigns to a third party.
A Google spokeswoman said, “We will work cooperatively with the Competition Bureau to answer any questions they may have.”
The news out of Canada came on the same day that Google suffered an apparent setback in Europe. Google hoped to settle an anti-trust probe launched three years ago by the European Union with a new set of proposals offered in October. But criticism of the plan emerged from rivals and consumer groups arguing the company’s proposals don’t go far enough. This could intensify pressure on EU antitrust chief Joaquín Almunia to press Google for bigger changes to its search practices, or to file a formal complaint against the company.
Google scored an antitrust victory earlier this year when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it wouldn’t bring charges against the Internet giant after a 19-month investigation into whether the company favored its own products and services in search results, unfairly harming rivals.
But the FTC quietly began a separate examination into Google’s advertising business months later. A person familiar with the matter said at the time that that probe was looking into complaints by advertising-technology rivals that Google is allegedly combining several of its ad-related services for website publishers so that publishers would have to use them all, making it more difficult for rivals to compete.
The FTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.


 

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