EU probing trio of Google complaints

(BRUSSELS) - European regulators said on Wednesday that they are investigating complaints filed by three web companies that contend the US Internet giant Google is not playing fair.

The European Commission "can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining," said a statement from Brussels, spelling out that the probe remains informal at this stage.

"As is usual when the commission receives complaints, it informed Google earlier this month and asked the company to comment on the allegations," it added.

Senior Google competition counsel Julia Holtz, via conference call, said, "we haven't done anything wrong."

Holtz said the Internet search giant intends "to respond to each of these separately."

"I believe the commission will like our responses and will decide that there's nothing to do there," she added.

In an online blog late Tuesday Holtz named the three complainants as British price comparison website Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing.

"Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners," she said.

Foundem and ejustice.fr expressed concerns that their specialised search engines were being intentionally given low rankings in query results, according to Holtz.

Ciao! was described as a longtime user of Google's AdSense ad-serving platform that began complaining about the standard terms of the arrangement after the company was bought by rival Microsoft in 2008.

A European Commission spokesman refused to say how long Google has to respond to the allegations.

Holtz described the EU action as "the beginning of an enquiry that may not go anywhere."

"We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market," she added in her on-line comments.

It is not the first time Google has locked horns with the EU.

In September the company announced it will remove all books still on sale in Europe from a US online market offering millions of titles that are out of print in the United States

The concessions to European publishers came amid controversial plans that opponents said represented a "big landgrab" of the world's stock of up to nine million out-of-print and out-of-copyright books.

The EU competition authorities have also had a long series of run ins with fellow US IT giant Microsoft.

However earlier this month Brussels took a decision which likely did not please Google, when it cleared the way for Microsoft and Yahoo! to blaze on with a planned tie-up aimed at taking on the Internet search king.