Google must sabotage its own search engine product within the European Union, Brussels has told the US tech company.
According an April 16 press release, the European Commission has written to the multinational to say that its search engine remains too successful despite EU efforts to undermine it.
As a result, the Commission now demands that Google hand out its proprietary data to rival companies with the express purpose of reducing the US firm’s market share.
“The aim of the measures is to allow third-party online search engines, or ‘data beneficiaries’, to optimise their search services and contest Google Search’s position,” the press release reads.
Speaking on the matter, European Commissioner Teresa Ribera — a key associate of Spain’s left-wing Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez — said that data gathered privately by Google must be made available to its competitors.
Sánchez, who has been plagued by numerous corruption scandals in recent months, has positioned himself as a key opponent of the United States, and has pushed for increasing EU ties with China.
“We will not allow practices that risk closing markets or limiting choice,” she said, adding that the sharing of such sensitive data will benefit the “whole search ecosystem”.
The Commission is justifying its demands with regard to the Digital Markets Act. A sister piece of legislation to the censorship-related Digital Services Act, the DMA is designed to undermine the presence of an explicit list of large tech companies in the European market.
Curated by the European Commission, the list has been slammed in Washington DC for containing almost exclusively American companies, with firms from Europe and China being mostly left alone.
Of the seven companies currently listed, five are from the United States. This means of the 23 services controlled under the regulation, all but two — TikTok and Booking.com — are American-owned.
Under the DMA, designated companies are forced to undercut the competitiveness and security of their own software by giving privileged backend access to third-party organisations.
Any company under the act that fails to give away their secrets, or do so in the way the Commission approves of, risks fines valued at up to ten per cent of their global annual turnover. This limit can be doubled for repeat offences.