Skift Take
The European regulatory probe of Google on several fronts is putting pressure on the U.S.'s FTC to jump into the fray after bowing out under less-than-stellar circumstances a few years ago. Still, don't expect any meaningful changes in Google's practices until the regulatory processes likely wind through the courts.
One of the repercussions of the European Commission's decision last week to bring charges against Google for its allegedly anticompetitive advertising practices could be that it finally shames the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into cracking down on the search giant.
The FTC declined to sue Google four years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, despite the fact that key FTC staffers wanted to sue after concluding that Google's search and advertising practices harmed consumers and slowed innovation.
Google has another seven weeks to respond to the new European charges, which call out Google for restricting the ability of third-party websites from displaying advertisements from Google competitors. The European Commission also reinforced previous charges that Google uses its dominant market position to favor its own shopping products over those of competitors such as Amazon and eBay.
The European Commission hasn't yet gone after Google for products such as its hotel metasearch offering, known as Hotel Ads, but the EC -- or perhaps the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice -- could take a look at allegations that its Google Hotel Ads and/or Google Flights are positioned so favorably on search results pages as to severely disadvantage competitors such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, Expedia, Kayak, Skyscanner and smaller companies relying on search engine optimization and organic results.
In fact, at the Skift Global Forum in 2015, then-Priceline.com CEO Paul Hennessy, who earlier had headed Booking.com's digital mark
