European publishers call on European Commission to reject Google’s draft remedies branding them "incapable of restoring competition in web search and search advertising"

Google offered the draft measures on 25 April, however Prof. Dr. Hubert Burda, president of the complainant German magazine publishers’ association VDZ, commented that Google needed to “come up with fundamentally improved proposals very soon” and if it doesn’t the informal press publishers’ coalition asks “the Commission to use its full legal powers, including an immediate Statement of Objections with effective remedies,” claiming that “fair and non-discriminatory search with equal criteria for all websites is an essential prerequisite for the prosperous development of the European media and technology sector."

The Commission invited complainants and interested parties to ‘market test’ to proposed remedies by Thursday 27 June and would base its decision on whether or not to accept the offer based on the feedback.

Of Google’s proposed suggestions, publishers have expressed concern over Google’s plans to label their own preferred links to its own sites in search results, claiming these could mislead consumers into thinking they were ‘tailor-made’ results to their search queries and interests, causing harm to competition.

President of the Spanish complainant AEDE (Spanish association of daily newspaper publishers), Luis Enriquez, commented: “In short, Google’s proposed remedies do not address the overarching problems and fundamental harms that Google’s conduct causes in search-related markets and none of them aims at restoring effective competition.

“Instead, the proposed remedies place minor constraints on Google that would, at best, modestly alter its behaviour but which in practice have no effect on the structure of the market. In some ways, they might actually make matters worse by entrenching dominance and misleading consumers. Hence, we all believe that more effective remedies including structural measures are justified and necessary as a means to restore the dysfunctional market to competition.”

Google has suggested that operators could choose to block their websites from access by Google, though publishers have claimed this is not a viable option as Google is super-dominant and in many ways the de-facto gateway to the internet. Press publishers’ concerns are increased by the fact that queries entered by European users on Google.com, Google Chrome, Voice Search, or Google search engines integrated on other sites are excluded from the proposed remedies.

The Commission has been negotiating a settlement with Google since May 2012 and it is expected that the Commission will issue a full statement of objections in the near future.