Google Will Separate its Shopping Unit from Search to Satisfy EU Regulators (Sep 26, 2017)
After its initial proposal to address the European Commission’s concerns over its Shopping search feature apparently failed to pass muster, it appears Google is now offering to separate its Shopping search business from its core search business in the EU, and force it to bid for ten slots above the regular search results alongside other comparison shopping services. The reporting here from Bloomberg makes it sound like Google might still get more formal approval of its proposal, despite the EU Competition Commissioner’s remarks to Bloomberg last week which suggested that it would have to play things by ear. This solution will certainly seem less fishy than the first proposal, which I said had significant issues, but it’s still not clear whether it will meet the approval of either the EU or Google’s competitors. Certainly, Google is now going to have to bid for slots it previously received for free, which will dramatically change the economics of the Shopping search in the EU. But as long as Google has exclusive rights to its past data about the results from those links in the past, it will continue to have something of an unfair advantage over competitors in knowing what to bid for them in future.
via Bloomberg
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