European Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Is Broadened

     BRUSSELS — The European Commission has widened its investigation into Google by taking on two German cases involving complaints from a powerful group of newspaper and magazine publishers and an online mapping company, officials said on Friday.

    Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner, announced a wide-ranging case against Google at the end of November, saying investigators would focus on whether the search engine company gave preferential treatment to its services when ranking search results, and whether it discriminated against competitors.

      By taking over the German cases as well, Mr. Almunia will get access to additional evidence collected by authorities in Germany, where more than 80 percent of computer users rely on Google to search the Web.

       The German cases also give a more European appearance to an investigation that so far has been dominated by complaints by companies that have received support from the software giant Microsoft.
Google said the decision was largely procedural because the European Commission takes over cases from member countries when there are overlapping issues.

     “We continue to work cooperatively with the commission and national regulators, explaining many aspects of our business,” a Google spokesman, Al Verney, said. “There’s always going to be room for improvement, so we are working to address any concerns.”

      The German publishers, known as the B.D.Z.V. and V.D.Z., and the mapping company Euro-Cities were told this week that the commission would take over their complaints, said Kay Weidner, a spokesman for the German Federal Cartel Office.

      “The commission is now in charge of the aspects regarding search neutrality” in the two cases, Mr. Weidner said.
 
      The cartel office was still evaluating whether to open investigations into other aspects of Google’s business practices in Germany, he said.
Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the commission, confirmed that Mr. Almunia’s investigators were looking into aspects of the German cases that were similar to what was already under examination by the commission.

      The B.D.Z.V. and V.D.Z., which count 450 newspaper and magazine publishers among their members, brought their complaint against Google a year ago at the German Federal Cartel Office.
The publishers accused Google of manipulating search rankings and have called on it to reveal its algorithm and stop giving preference to its services. The publishers also accused Google of failing to pay newspapers even though the company earned large amounts of money by posting advertisements near links to articles.

     “We appreciate that the E.C. is now investigating the case as it could be one of the most important topics for the digital press in the coming years,” the publishers said in a statement. “From our point of view Google is no longer a mere search engine but filling the result pages with more and more own content,” they said. “Thus Google is no longer an intermediary but a direct competitor.”
Euro-Cities had complained that maps from Google Maps were being integrated on other Internet sites free, saying the practice was destroying its business model.

     The other complaints in Brussels were filed by a British price-comparison site called Foundem, which is a member of a Microsoft-sponsored lobbying group in Brussels, and by a French legal search engine called Ejustice.fr. They complained that Google plays down their sites in its search results.
A third complaint came from Ciao, a price-comparison Web site in Germany owned by Microsoft, which originally took its complaint to Germany’s Federal Cartel Office before the European Commission took over the case.