EU Commission Slams Google with Non-Compliance Decision on Self-Preferencing
The European Commission issued a non-compliance decision against Google for its breach of the self-preferencing prohibition under Article 6(5) DMA. The commission relied on a narrow reading of the requirements in the provision to establish the infringement. This is the latest development in the 15-year-long saga between the European Commission and Google's self-preferencing behavior.
In the past, the General Court found that Google discriminated against rival comparison-shopping services by giving its own specialized search results preferential positioning and increased visibility, while lowering the ranking of competing results. This was considered an unfair disadvantage to competitors.
Article 6(5) DMA enshrines this regulatory embodiment, prohibiting gatekeepers from treating their own services more favorably than those of third parties in ranking and related indexing and crawling. Google's compliance implementations built on its previous obligations regarding Google Shopping, ensuring that rival CSSs were not treated less favorably than its own.
However, the European Commission found that Google's new features, including query shortcut chips, rich web results, and product ads units, did not meet the requirements of Article 6(5) DMA. The commission considered these changes to be insufficient, as they did not provide equivalent prominence to Alphabet's own CSSs as those offered by third parties.