Google points to Amazon in response to EU Shopping objections
In its objections to Google’s Shopping service, the European Commission does not take into account Amazon’s position in the market, claims Google. The case does not reflect how internet users shop online today, the company said.
Google responds Thursday to the ‘additional statement of objections’ about its Shopping service that the European Commission sent to Google last summer. The objection boils down to the fact that Google abused its dominant position with its search engine by systematically favoring its own price comparison service on search results pages. Other price comparators would be disadvantaged as a result. Google already stated in the original objection that price comparators should not be seen separately from services such as Amazon and eBay. According to the European Commission, this concerns different markets and Google weakens the position of price comparators, while Amazon generates revenue for them thanks to its inclusion in the comparators.
Kent Walker, general counsel at Google, states in his response that many services both collaborate and compete and that Amazon only gets a small part of its traffic from comparators. Google and many other sites are said to be lagging behind Amazon ‘by far the largest player on the market’. “The Commission’s case still rests on a theory that doesn’t match reality about how people shop online,” Walker said. According to him, many different services compete with each other, such as search engines, comparators, trading platforms and sites of companies themselves. “That’s why online shopping is so dynamic and has grown so much in recent years.”
Walker further points to a study that concluded that a third of German online consumers go to Amazon first and that 14.3 percent start at Google. Only 6.7 percent start their purchase journey with a price comparator, according to the study. “We’re getting feedback from our users that this just isn’t the way consumers want to shop,” claims Google. “Forcing us to generate more clicks for price comparison sites would only cause us to subsidize sites that have become less useful to consumers.”
According to Google, it is “not surprising” that when Amazon and other competitors started in European countries, traffic to price comparison sites fell because the online department store also offers the possibility to compare prices. “Added to this is the ability to buy products directly and have them delivered the next day, which makes Amazon an even bigger competitor,” Walker said.
The search company argues that the European Commission does not provide sufficient evidence in the objections and that there is no correlation between the growth of search services and the performance of comparators. The company continues to negotiate with the European Commission. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, previously said that the European Commission pays too little attention to Amazon’s market power, a claim the company is now repeating.
The Commission also published ‘statements of objections’ over the summer about antitrust infringements involving Adsense and Android. Google will comment on the latter case in the coming days.