London: US tech giant Google is being sued in the United Kingdom for 5 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) for allegedly abusing its dominant position on the search engine market, news outlets reported on Wednesday.
In a lawsuit filed in the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, Google is accused of unfairly restricting competition to boost its own earnings from online search advertising, using its “near-total dominance” on the market, the CNBC broadcaster reported.
The claim was filed by hundreds of thousands UK-based companies that have used Google’s search advertising services since 2011, the report said.
The plaintiffs claim that the US tech giant is abusing its position to restrict the work of competing search engines, making its own platform the only place for advertising, CNBC reported. Google also allegedly made deals with smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices, and paid Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine in the Safari browser, according to the report.
On January 23, the UK government published a statement from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) saying the regulator would launch investigations into Google and Apple to assess the impact of their dominant market positions on competition. In the statement, the CMA pointed out that all mobile devices sold in the UK have iOS or Android pre-installed. Thus, Apple and Google’s own app stores and browsers occupy exclusive or dominant positions on their platforms compared to alternative products and can significantly affect most of the content, services and apps users download on their devices, the CMA said.
UNI SPUTNIK
