Web giant's business practices to be further examined.
U.S. and European officials who are leading separate antitrust investigations into Google are expected to meet next week to discuss the search engine's business practices.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Liebowitz is said to be meeting with European Union competition chief Joaquin Almunia on Monday to discuss a number of cases, including Google's, an EU official confirmed.
Google's business practices has been investigated on several occasions by the FTC. The body has predominately focused on the way Google displays search results, which has been criticized for favoring the firm's own services over those of its competitors.
The United States trade agency is also examining Google decisions pertaining to technology licensing, which has received attention due to criticism of it being anti-competitive.
Google is said to have been engaged in settlement talks with the FTC for around a week, but is apparently resisting pressure to enter into a consent decree that'll affect its range of products. CEO Larry Page is reported to have met with FTC officials this week in Washington to discuss the matter.
Should the technology titan be found to be in violation of European antitrust laws, Google faces a fine of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, which is around $4 billion.
Meanwhile, due to Google combining its 60 policies into a central one, the company was ordered last month to change it following a nine-month investigation.
exactly. there are other people to. google never forced anyone to do anything, they all went to google because it was... here is a shock... WORLD BETTER THAN OTHER SITES
you want hotmail... 20mb of storage space
you want yahoo... 100mb of storage space
you get google... 2gb and constantly increaseing
thats when it was new, google owned the market
google also owned search because... remember in the past, what altavista and what yahoo looked like, i just went and they both cleaned themselves up significantly, but they use to have so much clutter it was hard to find the search bar, or even see results compared to google.
Honestly if you don't like what google is doing use a different search engine.
Yeah, like all of that open source stuff they own and contribute to, like Android, the number one consumer operating system, which is free and open source... Way too restrictive on the licensing...
/sarcasm
google is a free service YOU CHOOSE TO USE instead of bing, yahoo or facecr@p. anybody investigating google might as well sue themselves silly for violating darwins theory and inflicting the rest of us with misery for having to tell them to shut up.
that will be conning the consumer, it's bad, and it should be illegal (if it isn't)
but I don't think google does that, I think they are quite competitive