Google has abused its market dominance in some instances according to a finding of the investigation arm of the Competition Commission of India, reports Economic Times.
The newspaper quotes a senior government official familiar with the matter saying that "investigations have found Google guilty in one of the cases" against the Internet giant and that CCI is sending the findings to the company before announcing its final decision.
The case has been before the CCI for over two years now. The CCI is probing a set of allegations of abuse of market dominance against Google that includes cases filed by Consim Info, Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) and Albion InfoTel.
In its order clubbing the complaints filed by Consim Info (that owns BharatMatrimony.com) and CUTS, CCI said that there existed a prima facie case and directed an investigation against Google.
The allegation against Google is that the company has been abusing its dominant position by practices like search bias, search manipulation, denial of access and creation of entry barriers for competing search engines.
It is also alleged that Google provides a number of vertical search services like YouTube, Google News, Google Maps etc and in order to promote its vertical search services, it mixes many of vertical results into organic search results. The effect of such manipulation of results was that Google's vertical search partners will appear predominantly when an Internet user searches for some information, irrespective of whether the search results are most popular or relevant.
Under competition regulations, an entity found violating the norms could be slapped with penalty of up to 10 percent of its three-year annual average turnover.
Google on its part has maintained that the company has extended "full co-operation to the Competition Commission of India in their investigation" and that the company is confident that they "comply fully with India's competition laws."
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