BRUSSELS — E.U. officials said Friday that Google had submitted proposals aimed at ending a three-year antitrust case focused on its hugely popular online search service, but the offer did not prevent rivals from seeking to prolong its legal entanglements.
After filing a new complaint against Google this past week, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.
“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.
Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called hot-map.com, a member of Icomp based in Germany, said he hoped the offer by Google was “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”
If they remain dissatisfied, critics of Google in Europe can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Such cases can take years to reach a final judgment.
Google managed to reach one settlement Friday. In France, it agreed to pay €60 million, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, the president’s office said. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.
The new antitrust complaint by Icomp, filed Thursday, claimed the search giant was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.
Neither the company nor European officials were willing Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But it had been expected that Google would offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.
The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement between Google and the commission is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly before an agreement was reached.
The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January, after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine, that Google had not broken antitrust laws.
Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.
If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.
“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said Friday.
Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference Friday that Google had sent “a detailed proposal,” which the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.
But there is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, which means that negotiations could continue.
“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.
Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, which is the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.
Google Submits Proposal in Bid to Resolve E.U. Antitrust Case
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