The European Commission has announced the concessions which Google hopes will settle the antitrust case into the search giant’s practices.
The investigation followed complaints that Google was: favouring its own services in search results; using content scraping from third party sites without consent; and unfairly locking in advertisers.
Google has offered to undertake a number of activities, including:
- no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.
- label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results
- no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google
- offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google's specialised search services
The EC is now asking for feedback from interested parties.
Original press release. More on this story from GigaOm.