British price comparison site Kelkoo is ready to take its complaint against Google to U.S. antitrust regulators.
The comments come as Kelkoo and other companies believe that EU efforts to ensure competitive fairness have been inadequate, as it has accused Google of unfairly promoting its own comparison shopping service. After getting hit with a €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion USD) EU antitrust fine two years ago, Google started to allow competitors to bid for advertising space at the top of its search pages — a move that EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said was working.
However, Kelkoo CEO Richard Stables told Reuters that his company is still not able to compete because of Google’s prominent placement of product listing ads (PLA), which favor the tech giant over comparison listing ads (CLA).
“[Vestager] has got the remedy wrong. Google’s current compliance mechanism is failing the shopping market. Google is restricting visibility to users in order to continue benefiting from its PLA abuse,” Stables said.
As a result, Kelkoo has contacted U.S. antitrust enforcers.
“We spoke to the Federal Trade Commission four months ago. We are prepared to go to the Department of Justice,” Stables said.
Despite Kelkoo’s complaints, the EU hasn’t gone easy on Google. In March, it hit the company with a fine of €1.49 billion for limiting how some websites used display ads sold by competitors, marking the third antitrust penalty from the EU since 2017. It is smaller than the combined $7.67 billion that the EU fined Google in the past two instances.
“Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts, and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites,” said Vestager at the time. “This is illegal under EU antitrust rules.”
The EU’s antitrust chief noted that, although Google stopped the practice in 2016, the decision does require Google to lift restrictions of any equivalence, and not reinstate them.
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