EU's Vestager Says Google's Antitrust Proposal Not Helping Shopping Rivals

Google's proposal to create a level playing field for price comparison shopping rivals to stave off fresh fines has not led to more traffic for its competitors, Europe's antitrust chief said this week. From a report: European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager two years ago slapped Google with a $2.65 billion fine for favoring its own price comparison shopping service and told it to stop its anti-competitive business practices. The world's most popular internet search engine subsequently offered to allow competitors to bid for advertising space at the top of a search page, giving them the chance to compete on equal terms.

The proposal does not seem to be doing the trick, Vestager said. "We may see a show of rivals in the shopping box. We may see a pickup when it comes to clicks for merchants. But we still do not see much traffic for viable competitors when it comes to shopping comparison," she told a Web Summit conference. British price comparison service Foundem, whose original complaint triggered the EU case against Google

Foundem?

[sexconker]

British price comparison service Foundem, whose original complaint triggered the EU case against Google

Could they "foundem" the end of that sentence?

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

All retailers should have equal access to the market.

But the EU wants them to be guaranteed an equal number of customers, regardless of their product quality or prices.

That is not how markets work.

Re:

[AHuxley]

Re "regardless of their product quality or prices."
The buying of Apple and Microsoft desktop computer products and services over EU nations junk "tech" products over decades should have been something most average EU nations govs could understand..
The EU can keep trying to regulate until the free market acts in the way the EU govs want.
Create investment for and people having to buy from emerging EU tech brands...
1. Make only EU brands "legal".
2. Make the cost of using non EU brands more than EU brand

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

All retailers should have equal access to the market.
But the EU wants them to be guaranteed an equal number of customers, regardless of their product quality or prices.

I don't know just how different the situation is in the EU vs the US, but here in the US there are probably less than five total price comparison sites out of many thousands that actually list legit prices.

Standard practice here is to artificially inflate pricing of merchants that don't pay them, add in pressure tactics such as "X other people are viewing this product" where X is chosen at random, and post fake reviews for merchants that pay for higher placement.

OneTravel was just pointed out recently that

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

That's not how the EU works.

The principal is that you can't just dominance in one area to dominate another area. I.e. Google can't use it's 90% market share in search to gain 90% market share in price comparison too.

That's how we stop monopolies bring created.

Who needs 'em?

[lfp98]

Maybe, just maybe, the enforced increased prominence of alternate price-comparison sites isn't bringing them increased traffic because people simply don't find them that useful. Surely, if any of these sites consistently discovered hidden great deals, word would get around pretty fast and they would prosper without forced assistance from Google. So often, the price differences are minuscule, the links are broken, or the low-price vendors are out-of-stock. Meanwhile, the multiple price-comparison sites merely clutter up the search results when what you are looking for is an actual vendor.