Google Search: Becomes The Target Of US Competition Authorities

Now Google seems to be collapsing in its core business. The competition authorities have begun to obtain concrete opinions on the search engine of the market leader from the competition.

Because of its dominant position in the field, Google has been the target of several competition authorities, but so far the focus has been more on how various other services gain advantages over the competition due to their dominant position. The search engine itself was therefore rather a secondary site. But that now seems to be changing.

As from a report by the US news agency Bloomberg emerges, the latest inquiries from the responsible authorities indicate that the future might be to limit the market power of Google search itself. Among other things, representatives of the relevant department are said to have approached the providers of the small search engine DuckDuckGo. The talks were also about how users could also come across the fact that there are alternative search engines.

Little known alternatives

“We recently talked to everyone about search and everyone asked us very specific questions about search engines,” said Gabriel Weinberg, head of DuckDuckGo. Since there have been no official statements from the authorities so far, no official investigation procedure appears to have been opened. However, the inquiries indicate in which direction the discussion of the topic is developing among the competition watchdogs. In practice, it basically boils down to the fact that most normal users shouldn’t even know that there are alternatives to Google. In everyday life, the search for information or websites is usually completely linked to the name Google. This is the basis of the Alphabet Group’s entire market power, which was reflected in competition law problems.

As can be intervened here, speculation remains of course at the moment. However, it could happen that Google in the USA is forced to actively offer alternative services to users of the Chrome browser and the Android platform, which from Google’s point of view are both marketing tools for the search engine.